


Featherweight

by foxxing



Category: GOT7
Genre: Actor!Jinyoung, Angst, M/M, amino exclusive, gang au (sort of), hitmen!GOT6, some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-03-12 21:47:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 136,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13556235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxxing/pseuds/foxxing
Summary: It’s been 13 years since any of them have seen Jinyoung. Spurred onward into a life of crime from their delinquent childhood on the streets, the 6 of them have risen in the underground ranks to become the most successful group of hitmen under the Knight Group. Jinyoung, having abandoned them and their lifestyle at 18, has risen to stardom as the hottest actor in Korea, but not everyone loves him: on a sunny February day, a $6 million dollar hit crosses the desks of the 6 Knights, but only one of them is bitter enough to take it.Or: Jaebum becomes Jinyoung’s bodyguard under a fake identity to get revenge for a broken heart.





	1. introduction

**Author's Note:**

> strap in for the ride :) 
> 
> Love,  
> foxxing ♡

 

When he saw Park Jinyoung’s face on television for the first time, he nearly put his foot through the screen.

It had shocked him, more than anything. A single pulse of electricity that shot down his back like a lightning bolt and had disturbed the rhythm of a heart normally so calm and steady. It had stuttered and burst with the strain, on his feet in a matter of moments when the face from his nightmares was grinning back at him in high definition, unseeing, unknowing of the havoc he had been about to wreak. His smile was the same, despite the rehearsed way it seemed in whatever stupid drama he was in. Jaebum wanted to kick a hole in it.

And he might have, if he’d had the opportunity  No sooner than the sound of Jinyoung’s voice parroting lines hit his ears it had hit the sound of everyone else’s’, too, and their house was filled with the sounds of naked shock. Gasping and the mantric muttering of questions that went unanswered as the voice of their very own ghost hung in the air like mist.

Youngjae had been the first to show up. His room is on the ground floor, and it must have been a stroke of dumb luck that he wasn’t playing video games at the moment Jaebum had absently flipped the channel and heard it through his door. His socked feet made little pitter-patter sounds on the polished concrete as he slid into the foyer, nearly knocking over their entryway table as he regained his balanced and focused on the TV with dark eyes gone wide. Like Jaebum he had been frozen in place: he came no closer. He stared and stared at the glowing sheet of glass that was their television and gaped.

“Is that—?” Jackson came next, leaning over the railing of the balcony before almost deciding to throw himself off it. Jaebum had wanted to say something, anything, to convince him that it wasn’t— _It isn’t him, they just look alike and talk alike—_ but the remote had been squeezed to breaking in his hand while his heart began to catch fire like a dried up patch of grass. He heard the sound of Jackson sliding down the gleaming chrome of the banister handrail and wished, more than anything, that he could just close his eyes and pretend.

But where one came, another followed. Youngjae gaped like a fish from the foyer while Jackson careened into the room and stood at Jaebum’s side wearing a comical expression of disbelief. Soon Mark heard the commotion and came out of his room, beginning to ask what was wrong before he, too, saw the apparition on the screen. It was the stuttering of voices and then the sudden abortion of them that drew Bambam and Yugyeom to them; however, when the realization dawned that it was Jinyoung on the screen and it was the reason they were standing around like statues, his high voice pierced the air like an arrow that made Jaebum flinch.

_“Is that Jinyoung hyung?!”_

“Oh, my god, Yugyeom, it is—“

“Holy shit, is that really—“

“Fuck! That’s him—“

“What is he doing on TV?—“

“Is this that new drama everyone has been talking about—“

“It’s him, it’s really him—“ Yugyeom’s voice had broken off in a sawed-off sob like an injured animal. “It’s him! Hyungs! Oh, my god, he’s alive, that’s him—“

Jaebum couldn’t take it anymore. The steady raising of their voices as their realities came folding in on them like a house of cards was too much; each uttered sentiment and the tears that had welled in some of their eyes at the miracle of Jinyoung’s existence rose to a cacophony of sound that reverberated inside his soul like the ricochet of a bullet. It tore at him every place it landed, cutting apart his insides into strips of ragged misery. Jaebum grit his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut against the picture that Jinyoung’s televised smile had imprinted against the back of his eyelids like a bad stain that won’t come out. Finally he had covered his ears.

“That’s _enough!”_

His roar held the weight of his anger and it fell upon the rest of them like stones. Jaebum had just barely resisted the urge to hurl the remote at the glass of the television, instead turning it off and sparing it but turning to throw it down to the couch so hard it bounced off and slid loudly in the new silence. Five pairs of eyes that had just been locked on the television like dying men seeing a mirage now swivel to him and seem to hang in the balance while they wait warily for the remainder of his outburst.

When he didn’t say anything right away to break the silence, Yugyeom, their youngest, had no qualms about doing the honors. Jaebum had turned away from where the television sat in the open concrete square toward the stairs and could see the fire that blazed in his deep brown eyes.

“That was Jinyoung hyung.”

He had nothing to say. The wet trails on Yugyeom’s face were more of an answer than anything he could have tried to ask. _Doesn’t it hurt you to think that’d he left without a word? Why are you crying for someone you should hate as much as I do?_

_Do you love him? Do you miss him?_

More silence. What could he do? It was enough that he hadn’t shattered their television in the way that seeing Jinyoung’s face in the billions of pixels had shattered the icy fortress he’d built inside his heart over the 8 years he’d been gone. Jinyoung had turned into a ghost and slipped into their memories like one but returned, somehow, like an itch he can’t scratch. Maybe they would have understood if he’d broken it and maybe they wouldn’t have; either way they could have replaced it. Doing what they do in their line of work doesn’t come cheap and he wondered what the price of this would be. Be it money or blood, he would have paid it. But something, and he wasn’t sure what, kept him from doing so.

The other four watched the two of them warily. He could sense it, the way all of their muscles tensed in unison, unwittingly slipping into their personas lest Jaebum and Yugyeom start throwing fists. It was unlikely, though. Yugyeom has always been the most emotional out of all of them and he wasn’t surprised that the shock of seeing Jinyoung after he disappeared from their lives had made him feel this way.

“Hyung. He’s alive.”

“I know.”

“What are we going to do?” and a piece of him died, then, at the broken note of Yugyeom’s voice when he asked. He had thought that Jinyoung had killed everything and taken the broken bits of Jaebum’s heart with him when he left, but yet, here he was, feeling hopeless as Yugyeom asked for something he could not give. This was a young man who had come home bathed in the blood of men he’d been hired to kill and grinned through it all, but the image and sound of Jinyoung’s presence had turned him back into the wet-eyed child they’d met on the streets so many years ago.

“Hyung. What are we going to do?”

Oh, it hurt. It hurt like knives. Jaebum had built his elite and his reputation on being cold, on being unshakable, but leave it to his boys to pierce right through him with nothing but their words and the looks on their faces.

Jaebum had dropped his hands. If he was to survive this conversation and go on forgetting that Jinyoung had existed at all, he had to stick his fingers in a decade-old wound and dig.

“We aren’t going to do anything.”

Even Mark had blanched at that. “Are you serious?”

He refused to look over. “Yes. I’m serious.”

Yugyeom’s jaw knotted as he grit his teeth. “He’s alive, hyung, and you aren’t going to look for him? To get him to come back to us? To find out what happened?”

“No.”

The answer was harsh, but life is harsher. Jaebum continued to stare him down and the other four shifted nervously on their feet like a pride of anxious lions.

“But hyung—“

“But nothing,” he snapped, teeth almost bared. “You knew he was alive. His disappearance wasn’t a mystery. It was a desertion.”

Silence. There was little room to argue; Jinyoung _had_ left them a letter the night he disappeared and melted into the horizons of the earth, a permanent sunset. None of them knew about what happened that night. None of them knew that night happened at all. As far as they’re concerned, Jaebum had never been there and knew little more than they did. But he did know and even then, with the five of them watching him, he would take the secret with him when his body hit the dirt.

“You won’t even try?”

“No.”

The finality of his answer like a slammed door, but their youngest learned from the best and refused to give up. His fists has tightened until the knuckles were white and he had nearly crushed his teeth to powder.

“Do you hate us that much, hyung?”

It stung like a slap but he didn’t flinch. He couldn’t. Any sign of weakness here would give them the opportunity to dig inside and right then he had the upper hand, which he intended to keep. His voice was dead and cold like it often was when he was on a job in order to get his point across when he said,

“It’s not you I hate.”

“But you won’t do this for us? Hyung, you really hate him so much that you wouldn’t even try?”

“Yes.”

Yugyeom had begun to twitch—from the corner of his eye he had seen the way Bambam stepped a little closer to his brother and attempted to catch his eye. But it was no use. Yugyeom, like a horse sick with fright, shuffled dangerously in place while his eyes rolled with rage. If he wasn’t careful there might have been a fight on their hands, after all.

“Hyung—“

Finally Yugyeom’s persistence snapped Jaebum’s patience like a wire.

“That’s enough!” he shouted. “Enough! I’m not going to look for him. It’s been 8 years, Yugyeom. He’s been alive this whole time and not once have you voiced the desire to look for him—“

Jackson, still to his left, spoke in the soft tones of a dog who had been hit before but nevertheless repeated some behaviors,

“We didn’t think we had to voice it, hyung—“

Jaebum whirled on him. “Be quiet.” he turned back to Yugyeom and addressed them all: “All of you. Be quiet. Jesus. We’re not fucking doing this. He’s been alive all this time but you see him once and suddenly you all want to find him? Bring him in?”

More silence. His outburst had pinked the cheeks of all of them in an anger that they wouldn’t dare voice when it was up against his own.

“He’s been gone all this time. He’s a fucking actor now. And what, you want to bring him here? You want to take him out for coffee and tell him what you’ve been up to? Huh? How do you think an actor is going to react when you tell him you murder people for a living? That you’re a contract killer? You think he’d just smile and laugh?

“That’s what I thought,” he spat when no one answered. “I won’t let any of you risk all of our lives because you’re sentimental.”

No one had anything to say about that. He was right, in a way, although he hadn’t needed to present it quite so harshly. As he looked at all of their faces in turn that night he knew he had given them all fresh wounds that would not heal for a long time. But it had to be done.

Jackson, disgusted, was the first to leave the room. He had made a noise in the back of his throat and then he was crossing the entryway to the stairs, one hand in his blonde hair and yanking like he does when he’s upset. Mark followed, the only person who could comfort him, but not before looking worried. He seemed to think better of sticking around, though, and nodded to Youngjae as he passed.

Bambam was next. After looking back and forth between their faces, he couldn’t seem to stand it either. The house had been silent underneath the anger that pulsed between him and Yugyeom like a living thing. Only Youngjae remained, always their mediator, always worried most of all about the consequences of a fallout.

Yugyeom, though, had seemed to taste defeat for now. His body language had softened in exhaustion and he knew he would find solace in the lushness of Bambam’s room later, so he worried little about that; what worried him was the pure ache that had settled across his features like a permanent scar. It was, in fact, the same one that had scarred itself across all of their features when Jinyoung left.

Except for his. His scar was deeper, bisecting his heart in two pieces.

“He was your friend, hyung.” Yugyeom’s voice had been deadly soft. Jaebum’s anger was fierce but nothing filed away his edges more than the love he feels for his boys, even when it’s pit against his hate for Jinyoung. Even now his heart feels ill over the words he had shouted at them. Yugyeom continued, “your best friend. Don’t you miss him? You don’t feel sentimental at all?”

Oh, the truths he could lay naked on the table like a fortune teller’s cards. He missed him more than words could say. He dreamt of Jinyoung’s face often and had worn the corners of the photo he keeps in his wallet to colorless triangles. The world they had painted in Technicolor when they were young has faded to the muted colors of permanent rain inside his heart. Jinyoung’s absence like a thorn in his side that the skin has grown over and rooted in place.

But he could not say this. _Would not_ say this. Jinyoung had left them without a trace and, despite the deep well of his missing, there are some crimes that are unforgivable. And Jinyoung would never see the light of his forgiveness. Not in this life. And not in the next.

Jaebum, resigned, let his fists uncurl. He propped them on his hips and gave Yugyeom one last look.

“No. I don’t,” he said. And lied, as he often does. “Because sentiment will get you killed.”

 


	2. 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Amino is being a real jerk to me....so it's only on AO3 for now. Sorry everyone. :'<

 

The wind is cold where it whips across his face, carrying with it a tell-tale bitterness that speaks of colder days to come. Jaebum blinks water out of his eyes and tries to keep them focused on the building next door, despite not being able to see what’s going on even from where he’s standing up on the roof of the hotel opposite. In fact, despite the nature of the mission they’ve sent Mark and Jackson on, he’s finding it increasingly hard to pay attention to it when there’s nothing for him to do but keep time and wait. 

It has been, to this point, 13 long years. Their descent into the underground paid-murder scene was gradual; so much so that he cannot truly pin down an exact time in which they had found themselves successful in this line of work. It’s almost as though his life, and theirs, have split into two sections: the time before this and the time after which bleeds into the current. Though there is no clear divisible moment bisecting their timelines like this, the memories are enough to separate with some sort of accuracy. There was a time in their lives when they were seven, not six, and were still street destined delinquents, and now, when they are six, and successful, operating the most sought after hitmen syndicate that the city’s underbelly has ever seen. 

It has been 13 years since the very last time that Jaebum has seen Park Jinyoung. 

The wind slices through his coat and he pulls it tighter, suddenly absent. Thoughts of Jinyoung are always unwelcome, but they’re always at their most intrusive when the weather starts to dwindle from the oppressive heat of the summers down into fall and into winter. Sometimes, and especially on missions like this where he’s not really part of the action, his thoughts take a sharp left turn into unbidden territory and he finds himself reeling as he falls into the rabbit hole of memory. His hands pull the edges of his long coat tighter around his middle but the cold that slices through him at the thought of Jinyoung’s frantic mouth on his, some unspoken desperation sparked between them, cuts deeper than the icy knife of the wind. The countdown on his watch face counts down the minutes as he slips further and further away.

_ Hyung, oh, hyung— _

_ Jinyoung-ah, why are you crying? Are you sad? _

_ No. _

_ Then why? _

_ Please, just kiss me again, just kiss me— _

“Earth to JB,” a voice hisses, piercing through the cloudy memory of Jinyoung’s tears on Jaebum’s cheeks. Jackson sounds a little winded and annoyed, and yet, without even being able to see him, Jaebum can still sense the grin on his face. “Sorry,  _ Jaguar. _ Here, kitty kitty. _ ”  _

Jaebum does his best to shake off the momentary lapse in concentration and rolls his shoulders in time with his eyes. “I know you remember it and don’t call me it on purpose. Knock it off and focus.”

Jackson snorts and it’s so loud in his earpiece that he winces a little bit. There’s a faint slap in the background followed by a quiet giggle which means he’s been relaying his reaction to Mark, despite Mark being tuned into their same channel and able to listen. In fact,  _ all  _ of them are on the same channel, and he’s thankful for the walkie function that means they have to press a button on the device in their ears to talk. The only exception is Youngjae, who is far far away and able to use his headset. This mostly keeps their line free except when it’s necessary; it’s hard to stay conspicuous when your finger is in your ear and you’re talking out loud. Jaebum is silently thankful for the other boys’ positions and their current inability to chime in on the berating.

“Speak for yourself, jungle cat,” he mutters, and he could swear he hears Youngjae sigh down the line. “I’ve been trying to get your attention for like two minutes.” 

“Is it really so hard to just say Jaguar? You all picked your code names and I picked mine. And what do you want? Are you close yet?” he pulls up his coat sleeve to look at his watch. “You’re down to nine minutes.” 

“Yes, it’s hard,” Jackson says, “because it’s  _ lame.  _ That’s what I wanted to know, thanks.” 

_ “Lame?”  _ Jaebum scoffs, bordering on incredulous. “What do you mean, ‘lame’?” 

“At least everyone else’ makes sense.”

“And mine doesn’t?”

Jackson laughs and he hears a distant slapping sound like a hand on his arm which means that Mark is trying to keep him quiet. 

“Not really—“

“Guys,” Youngjae finally cuts in, sounding exasperated. He’s miles and miles away from the danger in the safety of their headquarters but can’t quite manage to escape the bickering that often occurs between Jaebum and Jackson,  _ especially  _ when it comes to their code names. “Can we focus here? You’re down to seven minutes, Mandu. Are you close?”

The conversation is dropped for now, much to Jaebum’s relief. Despite his easiness earlier, Jackson drops into a serious mode when he replies a few seconds later, 

“Yes. We’re on the 10th floor now, in the stairwell. Can you see us, Sunshine?” 

He must wave at the camera; Youngjae confirms. “Yeah. I can see you. The footage getting fed to the security room on the ground floor is looping, but only for another few minutes. You guys need to get in there and get out, fast.”

There’s a short burst of typing before Youngjae comes back and says, “Double B, Dandy, that’s your cue. Get the hell out of there. Go one by one—Double B, if you’re closer to the door, you first. Security cams in the lobby and on the street are looping too for the next minute and a half, so that’s how long you guys have to get out.”

Their line hums with silence as the commands sink in. All traces of the memory he’d fallen prey to earlier vanish as the adrenaline of the job rushes in: the game is on. Tension builds in the air like a sheet of ice as Bambam and Yugyeom make their way from the lobby and casino respectively according to Youngjae’s instructions; looking down, Jaebum sees them both the second they exit and slip into the shadows one after the other about a minute apart. There’s an audible breath of relief from Youngjae as the both of them confirm in quick succession that they’ve left and made it out of the area undetected and are on their way. The soft static resumes for a moment, until Mark’s soft voice comes through on the line:

“Outside the room. Repeat. Outside the room. Time?”

Jaebum checks his watch. “Five minutes. In and out, you guys. Time’s almost up.” 

“We’re going in.”

The line goes silent again. 

Though he can’t hear anything, he can picture what it must look like. He can almost smell the blood in the air, making his heart race, as he closes his eyes and orchestrates a mental picture of what goes on when Mark gets the door open. Jaebum can picture with perfect clarity the way it would fall shut behind the two of them, dressed as black as shadows and silent as death as they crowd in on the target. How the target would finally see them, gasp, try to scream; he sees in his mind’s eye the way Mark cleanly breaks a jaw with a well-placed blow at the same time Jackson is pulling a short sword where it had been scabbard in his coat. The seconds tick by audibly on his wrist where the wind has died momentarily as though the earth is giving this victim a moment of silence they don’t deserve. Though he can’t hear it, he pictures it, having worked with both Jackson and Mark before: blood sprays a patterned wall beneath the razor edge of the sword that whispers across their throat. There’s a ghostly echo of Mark cracking two wrists at once to make the hands at the end of them unusable while nothing but a wet gurgle bubbles crimson streams from a new smile in their neck.

“Two minutes,” Youngjae says. “Out. Now.”

Jaebum comes back from the picture he’d painted of their target’s demise to calmly watch the seconds wind down on the watchface. There’s an anxious burst of typing from Youngjae’s end before he tells them that he cut the feed to the elevator—one there, one down the stairs to stagger their exits. 

“The feed in the lobby isn’t looping anymore, but if you’re fast enough, Mandu, you won’t have a problem with the cameras in the stairwell since they went dark. Can you make it to the bottom in a minute and a half?”

“Yeah. I might have to take some short cuts, but I can do it.”

“Be careful,” Mark says. A weird feeling rolls in Jaebum’s stomach: he should be used to the way they care for each other like this, so nakedly, but he isn’t. He swallows against it and tries to think of them getting out on time when Jackson gently murmurs back  _ I will.  _

And he’s sure he can do it: Jackson isn’t their resident batshit crazy athlete for no reason. Jaebum is positive he’ll do something insane, like dangling from the banister to drop down multiple flights of stairs before grabbing onto a different one to swing up onto the stairs and pound down the rest of the way. Jaebum has witnessed Jackson in action countless times over the years and yet it never ceases to amaze him that the stunts he pulls have yet to get him seriously injured.

“Dimsum?” 

“Hmm?” 

“What floor?” Youngjae asks. Jaebum can hear the anxiety in his younger brother’s voice and wishes he could do something about it. They’ve cut it close like this a thousand times, sometimes leaving a job with less than half a second to spare, but every time it shakes Youngjae’s confidence.  _ If something happens to you guys, it’s all my fault. And then what happens to me? _

He’s never said it aloud, but God be damned if Jaebum ever let something happen to any one of them ever again.

“Fourth. Almost there.” A slight pause. Then: “Second, now. What’s the time? Mandu? Where are you?” 

Breathless, Jackson pants static into the mic for a second and makes Jaebum wince. “Outside. Door on the ground floor of the stairwell actually led into the alleyway out back and there’s no cameras out here. You?”

“Thirty seconds. Dimsum, pull your hat down and your mask up. There’s a huge group of tourists coming into the lobby right now that you can go behind to dodge the camera. Do you see them?”

Not wanting to draw attention, Mark’s answer is just a noise underneath the whisper of the doors opening. 

“Okay. Go!”

More tense silence—Jaebum stares down at the doors to the hotel, no longer keeping time on his own watch as he waits for Mark’s shadowy figure to appear on the curb. Finally, after what feels like an hour, there’s a skinny silhouette exiting the building and heading for the crosswalk. Somehow, beyond all hopes, he had made it out with five seconds to spare. He buzzes in his confirmation that he’s safe and on his way to the audible sighs of relief of everyone else as they check in with Youngjae. 

Jaebum, still perched on the roof, pulls out the cellphone in his coat pocket and pulls up the messages.

_ Completed. _

He waits a moment, looking out across the rooftops, the wind returned at the same moment everything in the hotel switches back to normal. Except, of course, the man who bled out on the dark green carpet of his room. Jaebum blinks away the thought of it: target eliminated. No reason to keep it in his thoughts anymore.

The phone in his hand chimes with a message:

_ Funds transferring. _

_ Good work. _

He doesn’t smile. It brings him little joy. Jaebum deletes the messages and wipes the phone, sliding it in his pocket. He gives the city one last, longing look before he jumps down from the ledge he’d been standing on and goes to meet the boys at headquarters. 

  
  


*******

 

He is, as usual, the last to arrive. Jaebum has always been extra careful about getting the boys inside after a mission and then checking their perimeter himself before he deems it safe and successful. There’s a reason they’re the best in the business: they’re all extremely careful and organized. Very rarely do any one of them take a job intended for one person when they work the best as a team, but it does happen, and they have been followed before. Due to Jaebum’s meticulousness, though, he made sure that a handgun and a silencer put an end to that before it even started; after he’d stumbled in covered in someone else’s’ blood and nursing a head wound the adrenaline didn’t tell him he had, the company decided to move their warehouse/base of operations just to break any other potential trails. 

Now, though, Jaebum rarely even thinks about drawing the gun that stays tucked into the holster criss-crossing over his back and down his sides underneath his suit jacket. As he walks the perimeter, cold wind slices down through the gaps in the buildings of the industrial district and make him lower his face into the top of his coat. One of the other boys might have been a little more hasty in walking around the building, but not Jaebum. Being careful is key. It’s the only way they’ll continue to survive this life. And though he would never admit it with his words, he would die himself before he ever let another one of them go. 

Nothing seems out of the ordinary even as he rounds the back corner of their warehouse. From the outside it looks like any other warehouse on the street, if not a little bigger; the steel walls are rusted to a flaky, reddish brown that will come off like snow if they’re hit the right way. The windows on the bottom level are boarded up though more so for protection and soundproofing reasons than trying to make it blend in perfectly. The inside, however, is probably unlike anything these other crumbling structures have ever seen: it’s a high-tech masterpiece, every inch of the place adorned in some kind of technology not only designed to protect their identities and whereabouts, but just because they  _ can.  _ He had insisted there was literally no reason for them to have a smart-fridge, but since it came out of their own personal pockets, he couldn’t really stop them. 

Plus, having a visual on his snacks before he even opens the door  _ is  _ pretty badass. 

Regardless, Jaebum’s thoughts are somewhere else as he puts his palm on the keypad just inside the doorway. It unlocks a moment later with a pneumatic wheeze, allowing him to push open the rusty, squealing door enough to slip inside before it thunders closed behind him. 

He shakes off the cold as he removes his coat, hanging it up by the door while the boys all ignore his entrance beyond a few muttered “hi hyung”s from the younger ones. The five of them are all piled on the couch like a litter of puppies, eyes wide and unblinking as they stare into the television just like the one that adorns their living room at home.

“What are you guys—“  _ watching,  _ is what he wants to finish up with, but stops once he answers his own question.

In the mirror image of the glass, reflected backward for him, is Jinyoung’s face. He’s smiling again, his eyes crinkled at the corners just like they used to when Jaebum would tell him a particularly good joke. His laugh sounds genuine when he hears it through the speakers; the sound of it twists the knife in his gut and he grinds his teeth together.

If he were a different man, he would tell them to turn it off. He would have done it that day, too, when they first found him on television and realized that, in his desertion, he had found fame by becoming an actor. But even on that night when he’d yelled at their youngest and hurt him the way he might a child had Yugyeom really been his—and was he not, in his way? Despite the relatively small age difference, Jaebum has raised him—he could not do it. It’s easy for him to look away from it, to ignore it; Jinyoung had betrayed him in the worst of ways, had left him, lips burning with a kiss he didn’t understand and a letter he understood even less, he had hurt their boys more deeply than he’d ever understand. Hate is an easy emotion for Jaebum to dwell on. 

_ Do you hate  _ us  _ that much, hyung? _

No. Of course he doesn’t. And because he doesn’t hate them, not even close, and because he is the man he is and not a different one, he had conceded to their desires. His refusal to reach out to Jinyoung, or to allow them to try to reach out to him, remained steadfast: they were not to try to find him, to contact him, to make him aware of their existence in any way. Jinyoung had given up his right to know their boys as he knows them now the night he’d stained Jaebum’s cheeks with his own salt and then disappeared over the horizon like mist. 

So, then, this was the only comfort he could offer them, as much as it fanned the flames that burned ever hotter in his gut at the thought of him. They could watch his dramas, his movies, his interviews. They could go to the cinema to see his movies if they wanted to, though they have a computer whiz like Youngjae and more often than not they’re watching it before it even hits theatres. The five of them piled on the couch either here or at their house in the city to watch his dramas weekly when he was in them, armed to the teeth with take-out and, if necessary, tissues. 

He could not deny that it hurt him, in his way, to watch them adore him like this. But he also couldn’t blame them, because their pain is different. His is deeper. His exists down inside of a heart he hadn’t known he had until Jinyoung had taken it with him that morning he left. And because their pain was different, but their love real, he would not deny them this one little comfort, whatever it was. Whatever solace they found in watching Jinyoung on the screen before their eyes, he would let them have it, because he could not find it for himself and it was all he had left to give them where Park Jinyoung was concerned. 

“Hyung, do you want to watch?” Yugyeom asks, voice hopeful, even though everyone knows the answer. “It’s Running Man. Lee Byunghyun is in the episode too, you like him, don’t you—“

“No,” he says, a little more gruffly than he intends to. He catches a glimpse of the way the camera focuses on Jinyoung chasing down one of the cast members, post-production tiger growling signaling that he’s a force to he recognized as he takes on Kim Jongkook. Jaebum only watches it from behind the screen for a moment, seeing the image flipped, the silhouettes of the boys pixelated and unclear like looking through water. He looks away, wind blowing through the cavern of his chest. 

“Okay,” he says, and shrugs; Yugyeom is used to and no longer bothered by the gruffness that talking about Jinyoung brings. 

“Is it almost over?” he asks, going to the kitchen for a glass of water. “We can’t stay here all night. We should head back to the house soon.” 

Mark looks over the back of the couch at him, arm wrapped around Jackson’s head where it’s leaned on his shoulder. As much as Jackson enjoys the thrill sometimes, carrying out a mission always makes him extra tired. He’s glad he has Mark to carry some of the burden for him in a way that the other boys just can’t. If only the sight of the softness didn’t make his teeth hurt. 

“Yeah, it’ll be over in about twenty minutes. That should be enough time for the car to get here, right?” 

Jaebum nods, eyes on the screen. It’ll probably only take about ten minutes for the car to get here since he’d told them to be ready today and they’re likely parked a couple miles away, but he’ll call them when the episode is almost over. These tiny sacrifices like tick marks in the flesh. 

“Did you eat?” Mark asks; his own face is expertly wiped of any emotion as Mark continues to look at him over the back of the couch while the other boys are glued to the screen. 

“No.”

“Eat now,” he says, softening. “You still have time.”

“It’s alright,” he says, catching an accidental glimpse of Jinyoung on screen: his body has filled out, still slimmer than his own in the places where Jaebum liked to put his hands. His hair is a little longer and not cut so goofily, either, styled in that perfect side swept wave that would look so good on someone who isn’t  _ him.  _ The smile is the same though: he doesn’t show his teeth often but no longer covers it with a hand unless feeling shy. When he rips the name tag off of Lee Kwangsoo with minimal effort and gets complimented by the prolific Yoo Jaesuk on his skills, there’s a familiar shy blush that floods his cheeks and is followed by a closed mouth chuckle. 

“Jaebum,” Mark says softly, drawing his attention away. 

Face still an expressionless mask, Jaebum looks back at him. “What?”

“What are you thinking about?” 

“Nothing,” he says, trying to believe it’s true enough that Mark will also believe it. Jaebum notices that Youngjae’s eyes have started to wander, watching him from the corner of them like he thinks Jaebum is too preoccupied to notice. Wanting to turn Mark’s softness away from him, he sets his empty glass in the sink and says, without looking, “Youngjae-yah, you’d better pay attention or you’ll miss who wins.” 

Jaebum smiles to himself as Youngjae blushes and looks away, back to the screen where Jinyoung is currently locked in a head to head battle with the one member he hadn’t been able to oust. No longer interested in paying attention, he doesn’t bother watching long enough to see who wins. By the way Yugyeom and Jackson jump out of their seats and shout at the top of their lungs while the other boys cheer and stomp the floor, it seems he’d managed to oust the tiger Kim Jongkook, after all. 

And so this is the routine of their existence, more or less, among the shadows of the world. They take lives and trade it for money, to in turn trade it for comfort and luxuries and the lives they had so desperately wanted when they were teenagers sleeping in the streets. They find the time to watch Park Jinyoung’s movies and dramas to bring them some sort of peace; to aid them in the illusion that he hadn’t left their lives with little more than a tattered, tear stained goodbye they’d never hear and a letter that offered nothing but a plea to never search for him. Their routine consists of this: these small happinesses of which Jaebum has no part, his heart made of ice and cracked somewhere deep in the middle. 

He calls the car around as the boys all stand up and stretch their sore muscles. When he hangs up and slips his phone back into his pocket, he leans against the counter and watches them as they tiredly pack their things and prepare for the long ride home to the other side of the city. The ghost of a smile touches his lips at the thought that he’ll have to wake up Yugyeom and Youngjae when they get there, both boys still childlike in that the moving of a vehicle somehow just rocks them straight to sleep. It’s been a long day, too, though, and he can see in their faces that now that they’ve gotten their Jinyoung fix, it’s time to go home and sleep it off. 

They all pull on their coats and wait in the foyer for the car to come. Jaebum stands a little away from the rest and lets the remainder of his earlier Jinyoung related tension fade underneath the lethargic buzz of their voices. 

If he were able, he would make it so that Park Jinyoung’s existence was but a scorch mark on the earth. He would make it so that the boys he’d raised and grew up with had no Jinyoung to miss. If he was a different man, in a different different time, in a different life, he would have made sure they didn’t miss Park Jinyoung at all. 

But he’s not, and so they do. Try as he might to deny it, to hide it, to push it down inside him and hold it under water until it drowns, it does no good; Im Jaebum misses Park Jinyoung more than they could ever fathom. But with the missing comes the bitterness: he hates him, too. 

So much more than they could ever dream. 

  
  


***

 

_ The stars are so much brighter than he remembers them. It’s almost as if he could reach up to touch them, to hold the burning orbs of them in his hands like the fireflies they catch every summer on the riverbank. The metal of the truck is warm under his hands from the heat of the day, trapped within it despite the sun no longer being out. Instead, the moon shines down, illuminating the high grass that brushes his knees to ghost white as it sways back and forth in steady rhythm with the breeze. When he closes his eyes, the smell is strong. The air is warm but there’s a certain note of briskness in the wind of it that makes the hair stand up on his arms like a bad omen.  _

_ Suddenly the wind changes direction. The earth groans under his feet as the world shifts, turning, rolling on her axis as it takes Jaebum with her. The grass underneath his shoes seems to fracture like a fault line, tossing him unbalanced against the rusting metal. He grabs the truck for support and presses his body against it, tightly, eyes squeezed shut like he’s waiting for disaster. He’s not sure if the world is really splitting open like a rotten fruit or if he’s just imagining things, but either way, he holds onto the broken down vehicle like his life depends on it. _

_ Nothing ever comes, though. The wind settles and then on it carries the nervous, tittering laugh of his best friend. _

_ He cracks an eye open. “What’s so funny?” _

_ Jinyoung is standing in the same place he always is, as though he’d materialized out of thin air. His face looks the same, dark eyes big and swallowing up the night like little galaxies. His thick lips look nonexistent with the way he presses them into a thin line and avoids his eyes. Jaebum blinks. Suddenly it seems as though the moon has crawled down her web to hang directly above their heads like a swinging lightbulb on a string. _

In the dark of his bedroom, his eyes roll behind squeezed shut eyelids.

_ Is this a dream? _

_ Of course it is. Jinyoung’s face is now paper white with the light of the moon only inches from the tops of their heads. The wind dies. The grass stills. _

_ “What’s wrong?” he asks, the one thing that fails to change about this dream that he’s had a thousand times. Jinyoung’s reaction is the same, too: he winces like he’d been slapped and only pulls his jacket tighter despite the warmth. _

_ “Would you kiss me if I asked?” Jinyoung finally says. His eyelashes cast spider leg shadows on his cheeks that haven’t quite lost their baby fat yet, though the rest of his body has. Sometimes in his dreams he’s just a skeleton with Jinyoung’s face; in those nightmares where his head rolls off and the skeleton begins to dance, he wakes up haunted by the jaunty showtune clacking of bones. This dream is not that one, however. This dream, so far, remains eerily similar to the truth of the night as it happened 18 years ago. _

_ “I’ll always do anything you ask,” Jaebum says. _

In his waking world, his lips follow the lines in silent motion. 

_ “Then will you kiss me, hyung?” _

_ Jaebum swallows in the dream. Jinyoung’s eyes are no longer tiny universes in his face, but the pure white where the moon swings on her thread above their faces. He fidgets in place, hands roaming nervously over the leather jacket that’s too big for him where it’s thrown over his tiny shoulders, and much like the real event Jaebum doesn’t seem to pick up on the agitation rolling off him in waves.  _

_ “You…you want  _ me _ to kiss you?”  _

_ Jinyoung smiles, but it’s a sad smile, and it’s one he never forgets. “Yes.” _

_ "Come here, then.”  _

_ Jinyoung steps forward. The ground under their feet shakes, a ripping sound like the earth tearing free from itself in a paper thin reality. He grips the truck for support and grabs Jinyoung’s hand, suddenly afraid that the fault line will split down the middle and pull them apart. Jinyoung runs into him and there are hands fisted in his loose t-shirt, a warm body pressed against his, and a plump mouth quivering where it covers his own. A lightning bolt strikes down his spine at the feeling of Jinyoung’s mouth on his after wanting for so long; he grabs Jinyoung’s jacket to hold him close as they kiss. In the upside down of dreams, a thunderclap rumbles from the center of the earth while it begins to rain salt on his cheeks where tears fall from Jinyoung’s eyes. _

_ "Hyung,” he whimpers, voice a desperate shake. The moon draws her way back up her string to plunge them into darkness. Jaebum wants to scream as the world rips away with a tearing, Jinyoung’s voice a distant waver in the gloom, “oh, hyung—“ _

Jaebum wakes up with a jolt as thunder, real thunder, explodes in the sky outside. Despite the cold that frosts on the windows, he’s drenched in sweat from the dream and he shivers as it begins to cool on his skin. He just lays in the square of moonlight painted across his messy bed sheets, staring out the window to the tops of the trees in their garden that sway and whisper across the glass. Residual drops of rain from an earlier shower blurs the picture to undistinguishable blobs of washed out greens and grays. 

_ Hyung, oh, hyung— _

Jaebum squeezes his eyes shut. The dream had been strange but not out of the ordinary. Sometimes they were worse, closer to nightmares, filled with blood and death and Jinyoung. Sometimes they were like this, innocent enough. Sometimes they were a direct memory of that night and those dreams were the worst of all. 

_ Would you kiss me if I asked? _

He breathes. 

Angrily he throws the blankets off of him where they’d bunched around his waist. Jaebum tries to shake off the dream, the image of the moon leaking into Jinyoung’s eyes like candle wax making him uncomfortable in a way he isn’t sure how to describe. Dreaming of Jinyoung or the last night he’d seen him alive always makes him feel strange, though, candle flame of hate burning in his heart or no. He knows he isn’t going back to sleep anytime soon so Jaebum pulls on a pair of jogger sweatpants and quietly goes downstairs to watch tv.

As he sits down on the couch and pulls the community blanket over his shoulders before flipping on the tv and turning the volume down, he wonders why the dream occurs so differently each time, why some are cinematic recreations of pretty things, like the one from tonight, almost aching in its wonder. Or why some of them are violent nightmares, where Jinyoung appears as something dead or dying or doesn’t appear at all and the only thing inside the dream is Jaebum standing alone at the truck like he had that next night when he found the letter stuck in the wheel well. Bright lights flicker across his face as he flips absently through the channels and tries desperately not to think. 

It’s no use, though. Nothing captures his attention for long before his mind starts wandering. 

Youngjae had asked once.  _ Why do you hate him so much? We don’t hate him, and he left us, too. So why, hyung?  _ And he had been without an explanation. How could he put a descriptor on the way that he had felt about Jinyoung when he never had the time to feel it? The others would call it love. Puppy love. First love. Whatever. He didn’t even understand what the feeling inside his heart had been then, not even that night when Jinyoung asked to be kissed, cried, and asked to be kissed again before he was running through the buckwheat and disappearing on the black horizon like a ghost. Had he known that it was the last image of Jinyoung, that his retreating back full of sobs was the last thing he’d ever see of him, would it have been different? Would he have known? Could he have changed the outcome, with Jinyoung never leaving and patching up the fracture? 

Suddenly more tired than when he’d gone to sleep, Jaebum rubs his eyes. No, he doesn’t think so. It would have been the same. The cryptic letter he’d left behind was evidence enough of that. The words are still stained against his memory, burned in like a brand: 

_ Tell them this isn’t their fault. Please don’t look for me.  _

And so what? Had it been Jaebum’s fault, then? Where was the assurance that he had no part in what transpired and that it was a decision all his own? It hurt. God, it hurt him so much. The others would never see it, no, he refused to let them. But it hurt, like slowly dying from the inside. The person that he had relied on since Jaebum could first remember had left. The person who knew him inside out and upside down, the person who never left Jaebum’s side for very long, the person that he would recognize in a life beyond this, beyond death, beyond the planets and all mortal things. The person who laid by his side almost every single night for all the years of their childhood and adolescence and listened to him speak about the stars had left him, empty and alone.

Suddenly the tears made sense. The nervousness. The way Jinyoung wrung his hands in his shirt. He wanted to know one thing, and only one thing: why? But he would likely never know. The letter had only said to tell  _ them  _ it wasn’t their fault. Jaebum had been given orders not to look for him, and so with the paper crushed in his hand and tears in his eyes, he made a vow as the sun set on his first day without Park Jinyoung. 

Jinyoung didn’t want to be found, well. Jaebum would never bother to look.

 


	3. 2

The dreams that were somewhat normal or closer to the true nature of what happened are the hardest for him to shake. Even after waking up in a panic on the couch to static on the television, the image of Jinyoung’s face illuminated by the moon hanging down on her thread stained the backs of his eyelids when he blinked. Rain pelted against the windows of their house like persistent fists as he laid shadowed on the couch and stared at the ceiling, numbness in his arms and legs and heart, until watery sunlight began to light the room to soft greys. There always came an ache afterward, heavy in his joints, that he attributed to falling asleep on the couch, and nothing else. 

Despite getting up and going back to his bedroom upstairs, he had been unable to fall back asleep after that. It’s not uncommon for him to wake up in the middle of the night, and it’s usually an even 50/50 split on whether he goes back to sleep or not; oftentimes in passing Jackson and Mark’s bedrooms on his way down the stairs he wishes there was an alternate route. It’s not so much the act that bothers him, of course, but the mere fact that they have each other and the person who had been Jaebum’s equivalent had abandoned them over a decade ago makes his insides feel hollow. Sometimes it’s just hard to let it go, especially in that precarious balance between awake and asleep. 

Jaebum is so lost in thought that he doesn’t hear Jackson open the door to the front patio, so focused on the frustration of not being able to shake off the dream that he doesn’t even realize someone else had joined him until Jackson is touching his arm and making him jump. 

He almost drops his cigarette, cursing under his breath as his heart rate ratchets up a few notches and then begins to calm when he sees who it is. 

“Sorry,” Jackson says, although he doesn’t sound very apologetic. He pulls the sleeves of his hoodie down over his hands and shivers. “Those are bad for you, you know. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

Jaebum laughs quietly. “I know. Old habits.” 

Humming, Jackson rocks back and forth on his feet for a moment without replying. The two of them look over the view in silence, enjoying the brisk wind that blows through the other houses built onto the hill of which they’re at the top of. It gives them quiet a lovely view of the bustling city from the porch jutting out from their living room. It’s one of Jaebum’s favorite places: so far up here and half of their house surrounded by trees, the noises of downtown are relatively muted and they have some privacy away from the prying eyes of their neighbors. Turns out when you live in relative seclusion on the top of the hill and can see the street from your porch, though, not even the gates surrounding the driveway is enough to keep them entirely from trying to look over curiously.

“You only do it when you’re really stressed. What’s wrong?”

Jackson’s question draws him back in, momentarily forgetting about the beautiful scenery that usually calms him in the way that nothing else can. He takes a long drag off the shortened stub of it and puts it out against the bottom of his sneaker before putting it in the ashtray on the table. 

“Nothing.” 

He can feel the look Jackson is giving him on the side of his face but ignores it, leaning forward to rest on his arms on the porch railing. 

“I heard you get up last night.” 

“Congratulations,” he mutters. Is that really worth mentioning? Jaebum constantly hears the boys getting up every now and then to go to one of the bathrooms or downstairs for glasses of water. But Jaebum knows that even without prompting Jackson will push the issue until he gets an answer he’s satisfied with, no matter how much that means he has to bother Jaebum, so he just stays quiet and waits for the rest.

Jackson doesn’t say anything for a moment, seeming to calculate Jaebum’s answer (or lack thereof) before trying again. 

“Did you have another dream about Jinyoung?”

He doesn’t respond. That should be answer enough. 

Jackson sighs after a moment, like he’d been waiting for an answer anyway, despite having this same conversation in various ways and places for nearly thirteen years. Does he never get tired of being disappointed by the answer? Even Yugyeom, the most ruined of them all by the rift it had caused, has given up on the disappointment that Jaebum’s scorn had brought on the subject. For the most part none of them seem to be bothered anymore, through lack of bringing it up or complete avoidance. The only one who can’t seem to let it go is Jackson. 

“You know it’s okay to miss him, right?”

Jaebum makes a noise of disgust in his throat. “I don’t miss him.” 

“Hyung…”

“It’s been thirteen years. What do you want me to do, Jackson? What will missing him do?”

_ Get me, or us, killed. That’s what it’ll do.  _

“I’m just saying...you dream about him a lot, and they always seem to mess you up for a long time after—“

Frustrated, Jaebum pushes up to his hands to grip the bitterly cold chrome bar until his knuckles whiten. He turns his head toward Jackson with a steadily rising anger in his chest as he says,

“You know why it pisses me off, Jackson? Because I’m tired of it. Because I don’t get why I’m still having dreams about it. I’ve been over it for fucking years, but it still wakes me up and disrupts my sleep when I’m trying to keep you guys safe and alive.” 

Jackson looks like he wants to say something, but he just tucks both lips between his teeth and waits for Jaebum to finish. 

It’s not entirely a lie. It’s been so long that whatever feelings seeing him on television for the first time all those years ago brought upon have withered and died like a flower left untended to, and in its place has grown a vicious and bloody weed. The heartache he had felt in the first uncertain year of Jinyoung’s absence has, over the years, soured into the black, bitter brew of hate that he carries low in his chest like rocks. Nothing could undo what he had caused, and no matter how unbalanced the dreams made him feel when they happened, it only served as fuel to an ever burning fire that would only die when he did. Even in his dreams Jinyoung is a betrayer, the breaker of threads.

“I’m serious. Can you imagine what that’s like for me, Jackson? To be constantly reminded of the person who betrayed us? I don’t dream of him because I miss him.”

Jackson, seeming defeated as he always does when faced with Jaebum’s anger, shifts his eyes away and shrugs half heartedly. “I get it. You hate him. I just think there’s more to it. Stuff you’re not telling us.”

God, he wants to rip his hair out. No one ever questions this except Jackson. 

“Why do you think I have things I’m not telling you? Huh? I don’t know anything more than you do. What reason do I have to hide things from you guys?”

Jackson shrugs again, not looking at him, eyes focused down into their fenced in courtyard. “If that were true then why do you seem to hate him so much more than we ever could? We all miss him, but you don’t. You hate him. Why? What happened that’s different than what happened to us?”

It would be an understatement to say that he is utterly shocked. Jackson hasn’t even looked back at him, and his cheeks have pinked, though from the wind or the emotion he isn’t sure. Not once have any of them ever come at him like this. Even though he has an answer rehearsed for this situation, it evades him as he never once thought he would have to use it. And yet, Jackson always seems to push further and further until it folds, and so Jaebum wonders why he’s so surprised. 

“I—“ for once he stumbles over his words. “Nothing happened. I went looking for him that morning and couldn’t find him, and then I finally found the note at the place where he and I used to hang out by ourselves. Did you ever consider that I hate him because I was closest to him? That because he was my best friend, I feel 

more betrayed than you? Is that not a valid reason?” 

“It’s valid, hyung, and I believe you, but there’s more. There’s something you aren’t telling us, and never have told us. You’re keeping something from us—“ eyes still focused on the courtyard, he suddenly stops talking and furrows his eyebrows. “Jonghyun sunbaenim? Why is he here?”

He’s momentarily so confused by Jackson’s words juxtaposed with the distraction that he doesn’t quite comprehend what that means. “What do you mean you think there’s something I’m not telling you?”

“Nevermind,” Jackson replies, uncharacteristically impatient. He grabs the sleeve of Jaebum’s oversized and overworn hoodie and tugs it before pointing down into their closed off courtyard: Yugyeom and Bambam are currently walking alone the cobblestone path leading from their front door to the gate whispering with their heads together. This high up Jaebum and Jackson can see one of the senior agents from their company standing on the other side of the high gate, leaning on the buzzer with an elbow. 

“What does he want?” Jackson murmurs, more to himself than to Jaebum, but Jaebum isn’t sure he’d like the answer. 

Even from where they’re standing, Jaebum can see the dark, shining leather of the briefcase he’s got gripped in the hand not currently assaulting the buzzer. The cold February wind blows his long coat away from a bit and Jaebum notices the well fitting suit he has on. Despite the grin on his face as Yugyeom and Bambam throw open the gate to greet him and whine about how annoying he’s being with the buzzer, he knows that an unannounced visit to their personal residence from a sunbae means one thing and one thing only. 

A new job. And a big one, at that. Possibly more dangerous than usual.

Jaebum pushes away from the railing, tugging Jackson’s light colored sleeve in a mirror of the way Jackson had done the same just a few moments ago. 

“Come on. Let’s see what he’s here for.”

Judging by the serious look now plastered across Jackson’s features that comes whenever they’re discussing work, he already knows. 

  
  
  


Jaebum would never say that he enjoys being a hitman, and he knows the other boys don’t necessarily enjoy it either, or are better at hiding it than others; for him there is rarely any joy to be had in extinguishing a life. Sometimes there is adrenaline, sometimes the knowledge and justification that the person has committed unspeakable crimes, but it would be a mistake to confuse it for joy. There is no true joy in killing, no matter how good they are at it and no matter how deserving it may be. And it brings him even less joy when he and Jackson enter the living room from the porch and hear the youngest boys coming up the stairs from the downstairs entryway cracking jokes with Jonghyun sunbaenim. 

_ That man is carrying a death sentence in his hands,  _ Jaebum thinks.  _ For who? _

As the youngest boys hit the landing with Jonghyun on their heels, Jaebum goes to fetch Youngjae from his room down the hall as Jackson jogs upstairs to get Mark. Ever their most hospitable, Yugyeom and Bambam lead Jonghyun into the glittering alcove of their kitchen where it’s set into the wall and facing the trees on the top of their personal little hill. One of them gets him a glass of water while the other, Yugyeom, continues to wisecrack and ignore the way he gently sets his briefcase down on the black marble of the large, square island centered in their open faced kitchen. 

When everyone has finally been gathered around the dark slab of the island, there’s a very obvious tension that has built in the air previously not present. The wind blows the long branches of leaf-empty trees against their kitchen windows. Cars make their way through the streets outside as Jonghyun takes his time looking at all of them one by one before looking down at the briefcase in front of him. Jaebum looks at it too, wondering, aware that his presence here and now in their house means something significant. Small jobs are given to them at the office. Jaebum’s chest squeezes uncomfortably: whatever it is, it can’t be good. It just can’t. 

“I’m sure you’re all wondering why I’m here with this,” Jonghyun finally says, piercing the silence that has gathered like a knife. Several of the boys glance curiously at the case when Jonghyun nods to it, wary but not yet nervous. “Before I give you the specifics, though, I think it’s important that you understand the seriousness and the requirements of this job.”

Uh oh. Jaebum doesn’t like the sound of that at all. He remains stone faced and stoic, though, hands gripping the edge of the island until his knuckles are white.

There’s a brief pause as Jonghyun looks at all of them. Nobody moves, a sudden and serious hush pulled down around them as any indication of a joking nature that he may have arrived with disappears.

Sighing, Jonghyun unbuckles the briefcase but doesn’t open it. “This is a single person job––”

“We don’t do those,” Jaebum interrupts immediately, much to the surprise and embarrassment of his teammates. “Not on something so serious.”

“Let me finish, Im Jaebum,” Jonghyun snaps, and continues as though Jaebum hadn’t spoken at all, “this is a one man job. You’ll be working with people outside of this group but within the same company for security reasons. Correspondance with each other will be allowed but extremely limited as it could compromise your position. Is that understood?”

Youngjae opens his mouth like he’s going to argue, or perhaps make a suggestion, but the look on Jonghyun’s face makes him close it again. Jaebum’s fingers tighten on the marble in thinly controlled restraint. He glances around to try and gauge the feelings of his members at the moment and feels a bit dismayed when he comes up relatively empty: Jaebum can sense the nervousness radiating off of Yugyeom and Youngjae, though their handsome faces are clear. Jackson has his head leaned on Mark’s shoulder who is equally as stoic as Jaebum though a death grip on Jackson’s wrist gives him away only slightly. Jonghyun seems oblivious to all of this and continues,

“Furthermore, you will be assigned a temporary new identity. Whoever decides to take the job,” and at this he glances at Jaebum, as though Jonghyun is somehow expecting him to step up when the time comes and take it because he is notorious for doing so, “will be taught how to cover up any identifying marks such as birthmarks, scars, or tattoos. Do any of you have any that are visible?” 

5 heads shake in unison. Jonghyun gives Jaebum a questioning look, and after hesitating, Jaebum shakes his, as well.

“Are yours visible, Jaebum?” 

“Not really,” he says flippantly. “There’s one on my neck and one on my back.” 

Jonghyun seems to consider this for a moment, squinting in Jaebum’s direction as though he’s trying to find it. “Let me see the one on your neck.”

Jaebum tries not to roll his eyes. He turns his head to the left, carding his fingers through the long, dark hair that hangs to the middle of his neck and starts to curl under his ears and the top of his spine. The mark there is obvious, but not quite visible beneath the strands; the tiny dots and connected lines in an abstract shape seem to dissolve Jonghyun’s suspicions when Jaebum lets his hair drop and it’s no longer visible.

“That seems fine,” Jonghyun says, nodding. “If you decide to take this one, Jaebum, they might show you how to cover it up anyways.

“The identity assigned to you is randomized and you can’t change it. You will be issued an entire new set of authentic documents containing everything from a birth certificate with new parents and birth places to a new passport to work histories that will check out. Here’s where you really need to pay attention.”

All six of them seem to hold their breath as Jonghyun’s fingers fiddle with the popped latches of his briefcase, taking a moment to clear his throat before saying,

“This is an extremely high profile target. One of the most high profile targets the Knight Group has ever decided to take on. While our other high profile targets have been successful, there is a certain aspect of this target’s lifestyle that makes us extremely vulnerable to danger. If everything goes as planned you will be expected to assimilate as closely as possible to the lifestyle of this client as necessary. You will be living with them in a prepared bedroom in their home, drive them places, do what is asked of you, etcetera. There will be little to no free time. There will be guards on duty that are not affiliated with us and know nothing about this that will be doing overnight watches when the client is asleep, which will serve as your free time to make calls and run errands as needed, but you will not be able to come back to the house until the mission is completed and suspicion cleared.”

The entire kitchen has frozen under the weight of Jonghyun’s words: even the trees outside have stilled, no longer scraping sorrowful winter songs across the glass. They’ll be getting a new identity and moving into the target’s  _ house?  _ That’s practically unheard of for them, having only worked jobs that require strategic planning and simple in and outs. Having to live in their home with them and be with them almost twenty four-seven implies that this is a very, very big fish. The five of them hold their breath as Jaebum bites his lip and waits for the pendulum to swing back down and crack the tension. 

“Is that understood?”

They all nod, slowly, and not confidently. Rarely have they ever had a lecture like this before they find out who a client is. His other five members are so hard to shake in the face of everything that they’ve witnessed but somehow the severity of this has made their confidence waver, and the uneasy feeling that had arrived on the coattails of Jonghyun’s sudden appearance only grows until he’s having trouble swallowing.

“This gig is worth 6 billion won. Though this is a one person job, I suspect that with your level of familial ties that it amounts to a billion won each.”

Even Jaebum, relatively unshakable in the face of money, blanches mildly at this. A billion won each is more money than they’ve ever seen combined. 6 billion won between of the 6 of them would mean that they never have to work again if they didn’t want to.

“Here it is,” Jonghyun says, and finally pulls open the lid of his shiny leather briefcase. Out comes a folder, thinner than Jaebum is used to, with the Knight Group logo stamped on the front and nothing else. There’s a sudden erratic thumping of his heart as Jonghyun flips the cover open and says, “I’ll let you all look it over and then call when you’ve made your decision. Keep in mind you don’t have to take it, it will go to someone else.” 

With nothing else to be said, Jonghyun closes his briefcase and holds the folder for a split second longer. Then, as casually as he’d arrived, drops it to the black marble of the island and bids them a casual farewell as he slips out the door. 

Too struck to move, no one touches the folder or even glances at it. Yugyeom looks concerned and confused as he glances around at all of them and says, “what the hell was that? He drops this huge bombshell on us and then just leaves? What the fuck?” 

Mark shrugs, face neutral, but there’s the pinching of the skin between his eyebrows that gives away his concern. “He’s always been kind of weird like that.”

Jaebum is so distracted by this exchange that he doesn’t have time to grab the folder before someone else does; he had wanted to take it and look at it first and ultimately be the one to make the decision, as that’s what he has been conditioned to do. He breaks away from the look on Yugyeom’s face and reaches for it just as Jackson’s hand falls almost delicately upon the crisp, white paper stapled to the back flap. 

He sees it at the exact same time everyone else does. Jackson had meant to turn the paper in his direction to read it, but his long fingers had frozen as they all collectively noticed the glossy photograph in perfect, terrible technicolor held underneath a silver paperclip somehow more intimately dangerous than a sharpened blade.

His smile has never changed, save for the fact he no longer covers it with a slender hand. His hair is still as dark as it has ever been, parted delicately and falling just above his ears, with thin-rimmed silver frames set high on the bridge of his nose and nearly covering the smile lines at the corners of his eyes that Jaebum had once memorized like maps. His full lips, his nose, the curve of his jaw, all of it so familiar and so adult, so alien. He is there on the page in a palm sized square, the apparition clinging to the doorways of their memories. A blood stain that refuses to be scrubbed out. 

Jinyoung’s photo smiles up at them, blissfully unaware of the target that has been placed upon his back. 

There’s a horrified groan that rips out of Youngjae’s throat, and it snaps Jaebum back into the present as he snatches forward and attempts to grab the folder out from underneath Jackson’s hand. His chest is burning, not quite an ache, but within it is the desperation to get a hold of the death sentence he’d wanted for so, so long. 

“Give that to me,” he nearly barks, leaning over the island and trying to grab it where Jackson is nearly folding it in half with the realization that crawls over him like slow undergrowth. He’s ignored, Jackson tumbling backward off the stool he’d been sitting on at the same time Jaebum nearly kicks his over in an attempt to reach for it again. The rest of the room has seemed to fade underneath the commotion of Jackson’s stool hitting the floor with an empty bang, each of their stunned silences speaking for themselves. 

“Jackson! Give it to me!” Jaebum shouts, coming around the counter, heart pounding. The emotion pulling him under where he’s trying to keep his head above water is so strange; it feels so disconnected, unreal, like he can’t quite name what it is even as it pumps hot adrenaline into his veins. Anger and guilt swirl in there somewhere, as real and touchable as it has always been, waiting to break the surface of the feeling that threatens to drown him. 

Jackson hasn’t moved, staring down at the page, face gone paper white save for the ugly blotches of reddish pink on his cheeks. The rest of the boys can only stare with wide, confused eyes as Jaebum gets close enough to snatch the paper from Jackson’s hand where his knuckles have gone colorless with the force of his grip. 

He’s not quite fast enough, the shock making Jackson faster. Jackson pulls the folder containing the hit for Park Jinyoung flutters noisily as Jackson yanks his hand back out of Jaebum’s reach and puts a defiant hand on his broad chest to keep him from coming closer. Feeling surges in Jaebum’s blood, rising to anger: he grabs Jackson’s wrist and twists, trying to get him to drop the folder. But he has underestimated their own tenacity and the flood of their own emotions, not even once stopping to consider how they will process something like this, knowing that, regardless if they take the job or not, their Park Jinyoung has a target on his back that only ends one way.

He died in their hearts once, it seemed, and he knows they’d be reluctant to let it happen for real. 

“Give me the folder, Jackson,” Jaebum growls, but Jackson seems unfazed by the pain of Jaebum twisting his wrist. Jackson grunts and fights back, immediately throwing his weight into his elbow when Jaebum gets his arm twisted behind his back. The sharp point of it hits him in the sternum, the muscle in his chest but nearly enough to cushion the ache of the blow. Jaebum lets go and rubs it out of habit as Jackson steps out of his reach and crumples the corner of the folder in his hands. 

“Did you know about this?” Jackson spits, uncharacteristically angry, although it’s not the first time he’s lashed out like this. His handsome face is flushed the the same pinkish red color that spreads down his neck as his breathing changes and becomes erratic with panic. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you?”

“Of course I didn’t know,” Jaebum snaps, rubbing his chest. “How would I know before any of you?”

“Don’t lie,” he practically snarls. Seeing the way his hand shakes Jaebum takes the opening, trying once more to grab the folder from Jackson’s quivering hand and is thwarted once again by a quick strike. “Stop! I’m not giving this to you!” 

“Give to me,” Jaebum commands, voice a harsh, violent growl in the otherwise deafening silence of the room. The other four are just watching them with blank stares like confused spectators. “I want to look at it.”

“No! Because you’ll take it!”

Jaebum’s patience snaps like a hair thin wire. “So what? So what if I do! What are you going to do about it! You think I’m going to pass up on that kind of money because you can’t get over something that happened thirteen years ago?” 

Jackson’s face reddens further as though Jaebum had slapped him, but even so, it seems to only make his blood boil further. Jackson throws the folder to the floor behind him out of both of their reaches and shouts back,

“Something  _ we  _ can’t get over? Why do you always act like you’re over it, huh? Are you just so desperate to get this job because you’re over it? You really think you can kill him, hyung? You really think you can kill him and not face the consequences of what it’ll do to us?” 

“What, give you enough money to live on for the rest of your lives?” he barks a harsh laugh that breaks against the tension rising higher and higher between them. “You haven’t seen him in person in thirteen years! What’s him being dead going to do?”

This time Jackson flinches, as though Jaebum had actually finally stepped forward to strike him. Hot tears well up fast in Jackson’s large, brown eyes; there’s a burning stab of guilt deep in the pit of his stomach to know that he had caused it, but the rest of his emotion boils over the top of it. The hush that has fallen over their house only drifts on as the other four standing around the island have yet to step in and the wind has found no reason to blow against the quickly fracturing foundation of their home. 

Finally, from behind them, Mark tries to ease the tension:

“Jaebum, don’t say that—“

He whirls on him. Jaebum’s hands shake, skin flushed, being dragged through so many emotions at once it’s all he can do to take it out on them. They forgave him once for the things he had said and forbade them to do when they realized he was alive eight years ago. Though Jaebum had known in the darkest corners of his heart, he was still surprised; he deserted them, and to what? Get famous? Is that really all he wanted out of this life? Jaebum swallows and swallows against the rage that claws up his throat that they should still feel so loyal to him after Jinyoung crushed their hearts in his hand like it was nothing at all. 

They would forgive him for this, too. It would be hard, but they would understand. And they would forgive him. 

“Don’t say what, Mark? The truth? I don’t understand how you can all be so blindly loyal to him when he  _ abandoned  _ you—“

“Maybe he had a reason to leave, hyung!” Jackson shouts, pulling his attention back in the other direction, tearing him in half. “Maybe he left because of something you did!”

_ “Me?”  _

“Maybe he was tired of you acting this way! Maybe he was tired of the way you think you know what’s best for everyone but you don’t!”

Jaebum fists a hand in his hair, talking through his teeth:

“You don’t know anything, Jackson! I’m trying to do what’s best for all of us and you’re standing here acting like I’m trying to kill your family!” 

The room is deadly silent after that. Jaebum’s harsh breathing permeates the air for long moments that pass with no argument made; he is about to accept his own victory when a voice, so small and similar to the way it had been when they found him wandering the streets, finds something to say. 

“Because you _ are  _ killing our family, hyung.” 

Jaebum turns. It was Yugyeom that had said it, his cheeks flushed too with the pink of some deeper emotion like anger or fear or both. Jaebum drops his hand and goes to respond but Yugyeom says first,

“Maybe you don’t consider Jinyoung family anymore, but we do. He was for a long time. And even if you don’t, hyung, don’t you understand? Why can’t you see that you’re going to split us apart?” 

“I’m not going to split us up,” Jaebum says dully, suddenly tired of arguing. He wants to pick up the folder and go to his room to look it over before he calls Jonghyun and lets him know that he’s going to take it.

Because he will take it. He will let Park Jinyoung draw these battle lines in the sand of their family no longer. 

“I’m trying to do what’s bes—“

Out of nowhere, Jackson is too close and throwing a mean right hook that connects with the middle of Jaebum’s jaw. His head snaps to the side, surprised, losing his balance and tripping over himself in an attempt to stay upright. Four gasps ring out as Jaebum’s ribs hit the edge of the dark marble countertop and he grimaces through his teeth in a pain he tries not to show. 

Jackson comes forward after him, though, eyes and cheeks wet with tears as he throws another fist. This one is aimed at Jaebum’s cheek and if he hadn’t been looking right at him it may have landed right under his eye socket, but Jaebum sees it coming as he pushes himself off the counter and leans out of the way. Mark jumps out of his seat and reaches out to grab Jackson by both arms and pull them behind his back as he struggles and gasps into a sob. 

Jaebum’s jaw hurts, and he’s angry, but he refuses to fight back. Should Mark let him go right now and stand out of the way, Jaebum would let Jackson beat him black and blue if that’s what it took for Jackson’s anger to burn out like a flame. If it meant that Jackson could understand why he has to do this, then he would take the punishment gladly; though he has denied them many things over the years when it comes to Jinyoung, he will allow them their anger. Their hurt. If he didn’t, they would never forgive him, but by letting them grieve in the open like this, there is a better chance that they will, in the end.

“Why are you doing this?” Jackson asks, his voice cracking dangerously like a whip, broken by the sob that rips from his heaving chest. “Why are you doing this to us?”

“I’m not doing it _to_ you,” he says, voice calm like the surface of a lake that boils underneath in the black depths of it. “I’m doing it _for_ you. For us.”

Jackson can’t take this; he lets out a broken noise and his knees give out, almost hitting the floor had Mark not been holding him up. When the oldest of the group pulls Jackson back to his feet and frames his face with skinny palms and leans in to kiss away the tears, Jaebum has to look away. 

Youngjae is staring at him; the other two youngest have excused themselves from the room and likely locked themselves in Bambam’s room. There is a haughty look of contempt and disgust that he’s never seen on his younger brother’s face and, more than anything, more than the tears and the anger and the despair, this is what shakes him.

“You’re not doing this for us, hyung,” he says, deadly quiet like a storm. He stands, knuckles white where his hands are balled to fists at his sides, and Jaebum thinks that he would take this punishment from him, too, from any of them, if he needed to. But he knows that Youngjae’s silence is so much more vicious than his violence could ever be. “Don’t lie and say that to us when you know we know it’s not the truth. You’re doing this for yourself.”

“Youngjae—“

“You’re selfish, hyung. You always have been. Have you ever considered maybe that’s why Jinyoung left?”

And with that, he leaves the room, slamming his bedroom door. Now he is alone, Mark and Jackson gone, too, to wallow in the silence of his choice.

 

 


	4. 3

The silence when the dust finally settles is deafening. 

After Mark had lead Jackson from the kitchen without sparing Jaebum even the pretense of a second glance, he is left alone in the eerie quiet of the kitchen to wallow in the warring feelings of anger, resolve, indignance and, strangest of them all, guilt. He blinks once and then stares at the place where the folder containing Jinyoung’s death sentence lies in a crooked, bent heap as though it is a thing that’s alive. The folded corners of the glossy photo like sharp teeth poised and ready for the biting. Jinyoung’s eyes two indistinguishable circles in the depths of a mouth that he has allowed to clamp down around his neck. The stain of blood on the first page where Jackson had most likely given himself a paper cut in the struggle as loud and violent as a gunshot wound despite the smallness. 

Another image blooms on the coattails of it: a rice field trampled to dullness by the footsteps of fall and tipped with clear flakes of ice where the dew of a foggy morning has frozen on the lifeless stalks. Bordered by the buckwheat and by a large, dense copse of shivering trees to the north, the water that had once come up to their ankles in the summer has drained into the soil and frozen in clumpy, crunching patches of ice and earth underneath their shoes. The fog of the morning blankets low, beheading the trees, washing the scenery out to a cold and anxious daydream in which he’s stalking Jinyoung through the barren field toward the woods, both of them running, an endless feedback loop of chaser and chased. 

Unnerved, he shakes it off. The image had given him a strange tingling in his back, like some sort of thrill or the desire to be cruel. Jaebum bends to pick up the broken folder and flinches when the glossy, ultra-bright photograph of Jinyoung nearly comes loose from the clip. It falls to the countertop when Jaebum shakes the papers loose from the folder to spread them across the surface, though the information listed on them is very little and, to an almost concerning degree, quite vague. Not wanting to feel the pressure of Jinyoung’s photographed eyes on his face as he reads, he roughly covers it up with the back part of the folder and shoves it away. 

It’s strange to be reading about Jinyoung’s life as though they’ve never met before. As if they are strangers. Which, now, Jaebum considers with a bitter snort, they might as well be. Jinyoung’s whole young adult life is listed here on the pages for him, spread out into sections broken down into bullet points and footnotes as though Jinyoung’s existence had started from 20 and not before like some novel’s hero. Some of these things are true: where he was born, in Changwon, and when, in a murky September. But there are no mentions of his parents anywhere, no names, not even the breath of a guess of where his parents might have gone or been, merely stamped out with an angry, red DECEASED where their names should have been. And from there the story unfolds, a false one, twisted up with lies not entirely unlike the ones that Jaebum has had to tell before, but he wonders: with this level of fame, how does he do it? How do the lies continues to be truths in the eyes of the public? There’s nothing in these files about where he graduated high school, even though he did; there’s a photo burning a hole in his pocket at this very moment that could prove that actor Park Jinyoung did in fact go to a crumbling high school in the slums. There’s nothing about where he’d lived, with whom, and where, before he was twenty years old and had seemed to find what would count later on in his life as a permanent family. From there the lies grow more complicated, taller and taller, into the weeds. 

And it angers him. Deeply. All of it. To know that Jinyoung had erased the history of not just himself, but the six of them, too. To know that the formative first eighteen years of his life by all of their sides had meant nothing to him to be so easily cut out and forgotten. Jaebum’s hands curl to fists on the countertops, the papers wrinkling their protest. They would still try to challenge him? To tell him he’s doing the wrong thing, that he’s making them pick sides, when Jinyoung had done this to them? Not just him, not just Jaebum, who he had once claimed would never mean anything less to him than what the moon means to the earth, but to  _ them.  _ The five boys who loved him unshakably even in their grief when he disappeared. 

It is for this, his tells himself, his lips pressed into a thin line of anger, that they will understand. If they couldn’t understand his reason before, then they will now, when they realize how easily Jinyoung had cut off the part of himself that held them all like an unnecessary limb. That there is no possible way he could still love them, and for that, for hurting him that way and this, he will deserve every drop of blood lost. 

Teeth in his bottom lip, Jaebum angrily swipes the papers up into a loose pile and carries them to his bedroom, leaving the photo to stare emptily behind. 

  
  


***

 

The next morning when he wakes up from a bloody dream with a jolt and sends the papers fluttering to the floor off his chest, the feeling hasn’t faded much. He was awake late into the night studying the papers he’d been given that outlined Jinyoung’s life without them and had fallen into a miserable sleep at some point. Jaebum sits up and pulls at his shirt where it has clung uncomfortably to his back with sweat; he listens for the typical day to day noise of the boys in the kitchen or watching TV downstairs but hears nothing except the faint manufactured explosions of video games from Youngjae’s room. It wouldn’t surprise him if the rest of the boys had gone out somewhere, and as Jaebum gets up and changes into clean, casual clothes before heading quietly downstairs, it doesn’t surprise him that he wasn’t invited, either. 

He’s not very hungry, feeling a bit off center still from the mess the day before had been, and the clinging edges of whatever nightmare he’d been having, but he has to go to the office later to meet with Jonghyun and get his paperwork so it’s best if he at least tries. It occurs to him when he sits down at the island with his phone in one hand and a banana in the other that when he’d told Jonghyun of his plans to take it, their senior hadn’t been surprised:

_ Something about it, Jaebummie...it just seemed so  _ you.  _ Like you were meant to take it. But that doesn’t make sense, right? Ah, who knows, I’m getting old and superstitious. Now, in order to get all of your new documents, come meet me tomorrow at…  _

And that had been the end of it. He hadn’t been surprised, and he had said that it felt as though Jaebum was supposed to take it, which just made him feel weird. No one outside of the six of them knew anything about what happened with Jinyoung, as Jaebum had made it a point as they all grew up to keep that part of themselves hidden. Jaebum is sure that given the chance, Yugyeom would argue that they’ve done the same thing as Jinyoung has by cutting out that part of their lives, but Jaebum knows it isn’t the same. It just can’t be. Jinyoung grew up and got famous. What would he need his memories of them for when he could have anything he wants at the drop of a hat? 

“Hyung. Are you going to eat that banana or just squeeze it?” 

Youngjae’s soft voice cutting through the silence of the kitchen breaks him out of the monologue he’d been running in his head and he almost drops his phone when he jumps a bit, startled.

“Oh,” he says lamely, looking at where his fingers had indeed started to tighten around the fruit in his right hand almost as though of their own accord. He relaxes them and puts his phone down onto the countertop before looking up at Youngjae. “Good morning.”

Youngjae is standing across from him at the island where just yesterday they had learned of Jinyoung’s death sentence. The juxtaposition now of a fabricated normalcy between the two of them makes Jaebum’s stomach hurt for some reason, and the feeling of it only grows when the look on Youngjae’s face sours like he wants to say something rude.

Jaebum sighs, intending on stopping him before he can start. “Youngjae––”

“No,” he says, more harshly than Jaebum has ever heard him speak before. He would be surprised, but it seems that the weight of Jaebum’s intentions has settled on them all and forced them to fight back. “Whatever you were going to say, don’t bother.”

With nothing to say to that, Jaebum just blinks and waits for him to continue.

“You can’t do this, hyung.”

Stomach turning, Jaebum puts the banana down half-eaten on the counter where the incoming argument has dissolved him of his desire to finish eating. He leans his cheek in one hand and levels Youngjae with a look that he hopes is as neutral as he thinks it is.

“I’m going to do it. I don’t know what else to say that will convince you all that it’s for the best.”

Youngjae just makes a face. “You keep saying that, hyung. But the best for who? Us?” he laughs bitterly, something that makes Jaebum’s stomach hurt worse. “I don’t think so, hyung. Whatever idea you have that this will be good for all of us, it’s wrong.” 

“It  _ will  _ be,” he replies, trying to keep his teeth from gritting before a real argument has even started. “I looked through the files Jonghyun gave us yesterday. He doesn’t mention us at all, Youngjae. Not even once. In those files it’s like his life didn’t even start until he was twenty and living in Seoul.”

“He wanted to make something of himself, hyung. You think he’s really going to put that he was a practically homeless gang member on his applications?”

Jaebum rolls his eyes. “Are you seriously going to defend him still? He erased all of us, Youngjae! He erased the history of you, of Yugyeom, of Bambam. Like none of you ever existed.” Eyes wide in disbelief, Jaebum laughs without any humor. “I don’t understand how you can still fight for him, Youngjae. He abandoned all of you and then forgot about you.”

Youngjae’s face reddens as if in chastisement but he doesn’t let up. “Who’s to say he’s forgotten us, hyung? We spent the majority of our young lives together. I’m sure he hasn’t forgotten about us. But that life, the things we did, he can’t tell people those things, not anymore. Not if he wants to stay alive and keep his job.”

“So what,” Jaebum snaps, hands on the edge of the counter now, “you’re okay with him putting his fame before you?”

“Hyung––”

“You guys have to move on from this!” he nearly shouts, but swallows it back, not wanting to dig himself a deeper grave than the one he already has to try and climb back out of. “We all have to move on from this, Youngjae. You guys can’t hang on to him anymore, not like this. I know it seems like I’m doing this out of something else but I just want to do what’s best for you––”

Youngjae, though, seems to have no qualms over shouting at him. He uncrosses his arms and angrily throws one in a vague direction for emphasis:

“No! Hyung! You just want what’s best for you! Stop trying to spin this like you care about us and that’s why you’re doing it! You don’t! It’s bullshit, hyung. You’re doing this to be vengeful and to get some stupid revenge on him, whatever it is, and it’s bullshit! When did that ever solve anyone’s problems?”

The outburst is so sharp, so direct it makes Jaebum feel humiliated. He feels his face redden and he attempts to argue, “It’s different for me, Youngjae––”

But Youngjae had been waiting for it. Youngjae jumps on it, interrupting him, crossing his arms again like he’s satisfied at finding the place where a blow would hurt the most.

“I know, hyung, it’s different for you because you loved him.”

Silence. Horrible, awful silence. The kind where Youngjae stares through him and Jaebum just stares back, eyes wide, feeling like the air has been punched out of the room. 

_ It’s different for you because you loved him.  _

Hadn’t he? For the longest time it was something he refused to address. A secret hidden down deep beneath the earth of his flesh and bone, in a place only he knew. But he had felt it, so long ago, the seed that had grown ever so slowly inside of him like a flower in the darkest of dungeons, sweet perfume smell hidden by the dankness of coppery blood and stolen weapons. It had been something that grew in spite of the chaos of fist fights in the street, of running from police officers through the jungle of broken down abandoned malls and parking lots. And it had grown, and bloomed despite the absence of a sun, bursting with a rich red color like blood, like the very essence of them. And Jinyoung had felt it, he’s sure, on the nights they spent laying in the back of a rusted truck bed, desperately searching for a constellation Jinyoung’s eyes couldn’t quite make out in the bedlam of the stars. He had touched the petals on the night he cried and he had plucked them out when he disappeared. The soil had turned to blood and the roots of what he’d grown were blackened, reaching deeper, the flourish in the spoil.

So, yes. He had loved Jinyoung once. He had thought it was a well guarded secret, kept close behind the gates of his heart, but with how easily Youngjae lays it out in the open for him makes him wonder if he’d ever really had a secret at all. 

But that feeling was dead now. Rotted like the roots of a plucked and dying flower.  _ This  _ is what sets him apart from the rest: the desire to know that the bringer of your own death may face the agony of what they brought.

Jaebum swallows. The only thing he can think to ask is,  “how did you––?”

“It’s obvious, hyung. Maybe not to the other guys, but to me it is. All you tell us is how different it is for you, how different your feelings are. But we all loved him. So what could have made your feelings so different if it wasn’t that?” 

It makes him sick to think he’d been so easy to read. He’s built his career and his reputation on being statuesque, untouchable, heart cold like the moons of distant planets. And yet Youngjae stands here and reads the truth of him like it’s nothing. 

“It’s not like that,” Jaebum argues, though it’s futile, and a lie, too, one that Youngjae’s face conveys he doesn’t believe. 

“How do you know seeing him won’t change it?” 

Jaebum blinks. “What?”

“How do you know that when you see him for the first time again, hyung, it won’t change how you feel? That it won’t all come back, and you’ll want to save him?”

“Do you think it can change the fact that he turned his back on us in the middle of the night, Youngjae?” he shoots back, but very carefully pushes the idea of it far, far away and denies even the possibility of it.

After thinking for a moment, Youngjae just shrugs. It is not a defeated motion, more so of one that implies that a preemptive  _ we’ll see  _ is going to someday turn into an  _ I told you so.  _

“Whatever, hyung,” he says flippantly, and half turns to start the water in the sink to make his breakfast. “Just know that you’re asking us to pick sides and that you have no right to be hurt when we aren’t on yours.”

Jaebum blanches. “Are you joking? I’m not asking anyone to pick sides!” 

Suddenly angry again, Youngjae whips around to face him from the sink. “No, hyung, I’m not joking. Is that not exactly what you’re doing? By taking it are you not asking if we’re going to pick a side, you or him? If we fight for him, we’re against you. If we fight for you, we’re against him. We love him even if you don’t anymore. Can’t you see how much that hurts?” 

There is a long, drawn out silence in which Youngjae finally makes a noise of disgust and turns back to the sink. Jaebum just sits there, confused, wondering just how he’d missed the way they’d all grown up and come to know him and his weaknesses so well despite trying to never show them. It’s no longer just Yugyeom that knows where to hit him until it hurts, but Youngjae, too, and it seems that the mistake Jaebum has made in taking this job is that they’ll eventually come to understand and fall to it like loyal dogs. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Jaebum finally says, and stands. Youngjae doesn’t bother turning around even as Jaebum pushes the stool in and prepares to go get dressed for his meeting with Jonghyun. The silence between them is deep like a gouge, filled in only by the running of the water as Jaebum sighs and starts to leave the room.

Determined not to let him go without a word, though, Youngjae turns the sink off with a quick jerk of his wrist and says, without looking up at him,

“I meant what I said, though, last night.” 

“What?”

“That maybe he left because of you.”

 

***

 

Unable to form an argument against that, Jaebum had just left him alone and returned to his room to get dressed. The words bother him, staying close to the front of his brain and interrupting all of his thoughts no matter how hard he tries to push it away.  _ Maybe he left because of you.  _ Could that really be true? Could there really have been some catalyst that had caused an unknown reaction that made JInyoung feel like he had no choice but to leave them and never look back?

Maybe. But what? 

Jaebum sighs and tips his head back in the chair Jonghyun had given him when he arrived at the office, closing his eyes against the headache that threatens to form from the constant circling of his thoughts around his fight with Youngjae. Jaebum is almost positive that had the other boys been there they would have agreed, and if they didn’t already have their own assumptions about the way Jaebum used to feel about Jinyoung, then they’d have new ones, so for their absence he is slightly grateful. That’s not to say, of course, that they don’t already think about that behind his back but he thinks he’d be fine if he could go along not knowing.

He taps the toe of his shining leather shoe against the drab carpet of Jonghyun’s office, wondering why someone so high up in a prestigious company would opt for such a boring office: it’s square, and not that large, with two filing cabinets framing a modest window looking out at more windows across the street. The desk is probably the most expensive thing in the room, nearly bisecting the small space in half with its long, dark top interlaid with carvings from various fairy tales and Bible stories. The two armchairs across from the desk, one of which is occupied by Jaebum, are the same boring grey color of the walls that are unbearably empty of any artwork or family photos, save for one large, tackily framed painting of A Starry Night most likely purchased at a flea market. The total just  _ blankness  _ of the room is driving him crazy, and he’s about to stand up and pace around when the door opens behind him and Jonghyun returns. 

“Sorry that took so long,” he says, coming around to sit in the desk and drop a thick folder full of various documents on the edge of it where Jaebum can reach. “They were having an issue with your passport, but they fixed it now.”  
  
Jaebum grabs the folder and nearly drops it, not expecting it to be as heavy as it is. “Jeeze, what’s in here?” 

“Everything,” Jonghyun says with a laugh, folding his arms behind his head to lean back in his chair and watch as Jaebum begins flipping through the documents. “Everything from your new birth certificate, passport, shot records, parents’ birth certificates, old school records. Front page has a basic overview but the rest is all stuff you’re going to need to actually look at and memorize.”

He thumbs through some of them, marveled by the authenticity of some of the documents he sees on first glance. Crisp whites, pinks, yellows; everything he could possibly need to become an entirely new person. For a moment, part of him wonders if Jinyoung did something like this: if he had found someone willing to fabricate an existence for him, erasing the past and making a new one so clean and untouchable that even those who knew what to look for couldn’t find it.

Then, a more disturbing thought, one that makes his hand pause where he’d been about to flip the folder back to the first page: what if Jinyoung recognizes him? What if Jinyoung sees him for the first time in all these years and can see through the disguise, the fake identity, the way he’d been shown to wear his hair long to cover the tattoo on his neck. What if he does all of this and it doesn’t even work, anyway?

“What are you thinking about so hard over there?” Jonghyun teases, breaking Jaebum out of the possibility that Jinyoung would immediately recognize him. Sure, he recognized Jinyoung on television that first time, but so much about him had been the same. His name, the shape of his face. Jaebum is no longer the thin, lanky boy he used to be: he has grown taller, filled out more in the hips and shoulders, grown out his hair to the center of his neck and learned to hide the defining moles above his eye from the secretary. He has new scars and a new name and he hopes more than anything it will be enough to fool the one person who had known him the best.

“Nothing,” Jaebum murmurs, almost dismissively. He flips to the very first page where there’s a photo of him paperclipped to a piece of paper full of untruths. “How long do I have to get to know all of this?”

As if he’d been waiting for Jaebum to ask, Jonghyun laughs and stands up. “Until tomorrow. You meet with the head of Park Jinyoung’s security team tomorrow, Son Hyunwoo, and will go through an interview. If that goes well, he’ll show you around the property and get you familiar with everything. After that, he’ll introduce you to the target and then from there it’s just, you know. Playing the game.”

Jaebum hums, half paying attention. “Why’s his current bodyguard leaving?” 

“Ahh…”

There’s a note of something in Jonghyun’s voice  that makes Jaebum look at him with an eyebrow raised in question. “What?”

“Nothing serious, but you should know ahead of time.”

“What?”

“The client? Well…” Jonghyun moves his head around a bit on his shoulders and sucks his teeth as though he’s thinking of the most delicate way to say what he’s about to say. “He likes to sleep around.”

Jaebum actually blanches. The folder almost tumbles to the floor when his legs uncross and he has to quickly bend down to save it from going everywhere. “Excuse me?”

Jonghyun laughs and buttons the middle button on his suit jacket before heading for the door. He leans on the handle, watching Jaebum’s face as it reddens at the cheeks and bites back a grin at his expense.

“He’s just, you know..” he trails off as he searches for another word. “Promiscuous, you could say. According to our sources, he likes to seduce his bodyguards the most, which usually gets them fired or they quit since it becomes a conflict of interest.” He shrugs. “It’s not a huge deal, but I at least thought I should let you know. With a personality like that, he’s bound to be high maintenance.”

Jaebum just blinks at him, uncharacteristically shocked by this news. “You––”

“Ahh, don’t worry about it,” Jonghyun says, waving him off and opening the door. “You’re cold as ice, Jaebummie, I don’t think you have much to worry about with him.” He nods at the folder, half out of the door know. “Just make sure to study that and you’ll be fine. You’re not one of our best hitmen for nothing, Im Jaebum.”

And with that, he closes the door to his office and leaves Jaebum alone in the silence.

_ Promiscuous. _

What the hell? Jaebum has totally forgone looking at the paperwork in his lap he should be memorizing and is instead starting out the window while his mind spins in two directions. Did Jonghyun really just tell him that Jinyoung is kind of promiscuous? That he likes to  _ sleep with his bodyguards?  _ Jaebum swallows nervously and looks down at the folder where the cover is folded open and the first page stares back at him. The nature of their...friendship, relationship, whatever you want to call it, had never been sexual. Maybe some sexual tension here and there, sure, being two boys growing up together in the shadow of the other and with limited personal space by choice, but it was never outright sexual. The only thing they did was kiss the night Jinyoung left, and that was all, and it was the most confusing kiss Jaebum had ever had. But now in their adult lives, Jinyoung is  _ known  _ for seducing his bodyguards? And Jaebum is about to become one so that he can eventually snuff out the flame of Jinyoung’s life like two wet fingers on a candle’s wick.

He swallows, squares his shoulders back to shake off the feeling it had given him and decides that the boys  _ definitely  _ don’t need to know that particular aspect of the job.

The thought never really leaves him, but it is at least easier to push away and ignore when he hunkers down and gets serious about reviewing his materials. There’s a lot for him to learn: places, people, pets, things. Everything about his stories has to be consistent, and it’s so strange to him in a way to see it all written out for him like this, down to the detail as though he is some character in a play. Stories like how he got certain scars on his body ( _ this one is from crashing my bike when I was nine)  _ to stories about a dog he used to have and was even supplied with photos to share if push came to shove. Everything down to a birth to erase anything and everything that makes him Im Jaebum. 

He shoves all the hospital documents and government files back into the folder to look at the few pieces of paper that were stapled to the front as a general outline. It’s weird seeing it there, all neat and lined up in the same way that Jinyoung’s file had been:

Yoo Se Jin. Same age as the real Jaebum, only his birthday is now December 26. Close enough to be memorable but far enough away that he won’t slip up and say his real birthday. Born in Jeju but moved to Seoul as a baby and went to multiple schools before eventually graduating from Seoul National University in military history of Korea. There’s a small section about his time during mandatory service, and how he got his start as a bodyguard then and wanted to pursue it full time once he was discharged. Jaebum laughs a little; he hopes that’s more convincing out loud than it is on paper. 

The more he reads through the document, the more that he can see that it is as far from the truth of himself that it can possibly be without being suspicious. Everything about his new life as “Yoo Sejin” is rooted precariously in made-up fact, and he wonders if these were all truly fabricated or if they are a conglomerate of real memories from real people to give them the authenticity they need for it to come across. Primary schools, high schools, professors and letters of recommendations and previous jobs, all of it contained in this single folder that has become the key to erasing such a permanent scar. 

After hours of reading alone in Jonghyun’s office and taking notes, memorizing name after name after name until his brain no longer has the capacity for a new identity, he calls the car around and goes home. Jaebum watches the city pass by out the window, absentmindedly repeating his new name over and over in his head as if he could say it enough times to make it come true, to be another person, to leave this painful history behind.  _ Yoo Sejin. Yoo Sejin. Yoo Sejin.  _ A trustworthy man with clean hands and no one to hate him for the decisions that he makes. A man who knows nothing of blood but everything of loyalty and service and protection, someone innocent and free from the confines of the life that he leads.

But he, this Yoo Sejin, is a man made up of lies, too.

 

 

By the time Jaebum gets back to their house, the sun has already slipped way passed the horizon and coated the world in a dense dark. There’s the tell-tale sound of video games coming from Youngjae’s room, coupled with the hush of overlapping voices that means the others must be hanging out in his room with him while he plays. Even if it’s a little terrible of him, part of him is relieved; it gives him an easy passage through the shadows of the house to his own room undetected and safe from the harsh stares or the questions they might want to be asking. 

Once in his room, Jaebum throws the packet down onto his bed and then stands there with his suit jacket halfway down his elbows. A sudden shock goes through him, one of an almost detached uncertainty: should he do this? Is this really happening? He looks down at a packet containing the details of a fabricated life with his face on the front and realizes that, yes, it is. In his own way he feels like a child that has coveted an expensive, complicated toy for so long but once they have it in their hands, they have lost the sense of wonder, overcome now with the sense of  _ how do I make this work  _ and no longer  _ how do I let this make me happy.  _ It has been such a long time and Jaebum, for the first time, wonders if happiness is something that is no longer within his reach.

Pushing the thought aside, he carelessly tosses a duffle bag on the bed on top of the papers he’d been given and starts to rummage around in his drawers for things to take. He doesn’t know how long this assignment is going to take, days or weeks or, god forbid, even months, so the uncertainty of this makes packing so much more stressful than it should be. Assuming he’ll have access to a washer and dryer he doesn’t need to pack everything, he supposes, but he can’t be folding his nice suits into a  _ duffel bag  _ and he can’t––

The sound of his bedroom door opening quietly behind him makes him jump and drop the handful of underwear and socks he’d been holding. Jackson sticks his head in, blonde hair flopped down into his eyes as he looks around the room for a moment like he’s making sure they’re alone. There’s a certain glint to the dark brown of his eyes that tells Jaebum another argument is coming but if he tiptoes just right they may be able to avoid it.

“You can come in, if you want.” 

He watches as Jackson seems to think about it before coming all the way in and closing the door silently behind him. Now that he’s more in the light and not so shadowed by the hallway, Jaebum can see the signs that Jackson had been crying: the red stain on his cheeks that hasn’t quite gone, the swollen corners of his eyes and the way he blinks his eyes more rapidly like the open air stings. 

“So," Jackson says, hesitating a moment, glancing down at the mess of things on Jaebum’s bed before looking back up at him with those eyes like black holes, conveying every emotion he’s ever felt without having to say a single word. “You’re really going to do it, huh?” 

He isn’t sure what else he can say. “Yes.”  
  
Jackson makes a single noise: a slight, aborted  _ hic  _ sound like he’d drawn a breath and it fell short. Even from where he’s standing Jaebum can see the way his eyes well up with tears again, drowning in the umber, up and up until some spill down and follow the tear tracks that had already been there. Jaebum’s heart squeezes painfully for the first time since this whole ordeal––Jackson has always been sensitive, sometimes to a fault, almost a rival for the sensitivity that Yugyeom has shown. But he has also always been brave, fighting easily alongside Mark with that telepathy that bonafide soulmates seem to have without a word of complaint. And he’s always been soft, too, the first of them all to break during a fight and say  _ I love you and I’m sorry.  _ Something about the rawness, the utter razor blade edged emotion on his face make him feel like he’s cutting Jaebum’s insides to ribbons. 

“I don’t understand, hyung, I don’t––”

“And you won’t, not for now,” Jaebum interjects, trying to be gentle. But it seems that the comfort Jaebum tried to give felt more like fists when Jackson tenses.

“No, I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear what you have to say. Don’t you see what this is doing to us, hyung? You’re tearing us apart. We’re supposed to be a family.”

“We  _ are  _ a family––” 

“No!” Jackson shouts, tears dripping off his chin and splashing against the white collar of his t-shirt. The silver necklace around his neck that Mark had gotten him some time ago gleams against his skin and Jaebum focuses on that instead of the heartbreak on Jackson’s face. “You always say that but you never mean it. I know you don’t mean it. God, hyung, why are you being so selfish?”

“You heard Jonghyun. If it wasn’t us, it would be someone else. He’s been targeted. He would have died anyway.”

Jackson pales and flinches as if slapped. “So what? You’d rather have us know that it was you who killed him instead of waking up to find out that he died? Did you think it would be easier for us to know that you had taken his life away than if we had woken up to find out like everyone else? Huh? You think that’s easier, hyung?”

“Jackson, it’s for all of us––”

_ “No it isn’t!”  _ he screams, so loudly that he knows the other boys had to have heard him. Jaebum’s heart breaks and sinks like a ship as Jackson wipes an arm furiously across his eyes, doing nothing to dry the tears but merely smears them across his face like paint. “You’re not doing it for us, hyung. You’re doing it for you. Youngjae was right, you know. Have you ever considered that he left because of you?”

Jaebum grits his teeth and tries not to shout back. As angry as this makes him, he knows that Jackson is grieving for something that hasn’t even happened and if he expects even the smallest amount of forgiveness in the future he has to allow them this, this expression of pain. He opens his mouth to argue his point but Jackson just closes his eyes and turns away, halfway out the door before he seems to think of something else. 

Jackson stops in the doorway, looking for all the world like he’s really straddling the line between them as though it were a physical thing.

“Jackson––”

“Part of me,” he says, as though Jaebum hadn’t spoken, and in a voice as quiet as death, “as terrible as it is, hopes you don’t come back. If it comes to choosing sides, hyung, well.” 

Jackson meets his eyes again, holding them. 

“I’d rather lose both than choose.”

Jackson closes the door behind him, leaving Jaebum alone once more and on the side of a line he himself had drawn.

 

 


	5. 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> there's a line that goes all the way  
>  from my childhood to you  
> [_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H7QgPNS4BM)

_ “Are you fucking crazy? Hyung!”  _

_ Someone had told him once about the weight of your last words; he can’t remember who anymore. How to make everything you say count because you never know when it could be the last thing to leave your lips before you leave the world behind. Speak with passion, with purpose. Draw blood when it is required. Patch wounds when it is not.  _

_ All of this about last words, spoken from our own mouths. But what Jaebum had been unprepared for was the last words of someone else: what the last thing he would hear from the mouth of another person would be as life left him, in whatever unpredictable way it chose to. He was never prepared for this, and it occurred to him suddenly, terribly, as the skin of his knees scraped the asphalt when they buckled. It occurred to him belatedly like a dream he had forgotten and just remembered as searing heat spread through the top of his shoulder over his heart, amazed by the blooming red stain.  _ It’s a poppy flower,  _ he had thought distantly, breath hitching uncomfortably as his body fell backward into a pair of skinny arms.  _ How beautiful. 

_ Noise seemed to snap back into place like the puncture of a vacuum. Shouting, the thunder of hundreds of footsteps on the pavement, or was it just an echo? His dark eyes were shuttered by the drooping of tired eyelids. Skinny fingers dug painfully into the places under his arms and pulled him backward against a body much thinner than his own, the broken sound of sobs like the falling glass of a smashed in window. Jaebum touched the poppy on his chest, bigger now, and his fingers came away wet and slick with the color of it.  _

_ Because it was not a flower.  _

_ It was blood. _

_ “Hyung, hyung, oh, my god, hyung, what did you do? What did you do?” _

Is that Jinyoung? _ He tried to turn but the poppy red stain only grew and the burning intensified until he gasped, a bloating fish on the deck. He had tried to speak to him, too; tried to grab his hand and put it over his heart on his chest to feel the sluggish beating of it, but there was no strength left in his arms. All he could do was drop his head back against Jinyoung’s delicate shoulder he’d dreamt of a thousand times and think wondrously, _

Lucky the last thing I hear is Jinyoung’s voice. 

_ But the words—hyung, hyung, what did you do—they didn’t make any sense. What did he mean? Jaebum did what he had to. Surely Jinyoung understood, after laying in the truck together on countless nights for years, Jinyoung understood Jaebum’s position. What he had to do, and when, and why. He even said he understood, but through the fog of Jaebum’s fading memories, he wondered if it was true that Jinyoung had said it as he turned away, as if to hide the truth of his lie on his face. _

_ He wanted Jinyoung to say something important but nothing came. It was a mantra of  _ hyung, why, hyung what did you do, hyung, please, _ repeated in circles like a preacher’s sermon. And maybe, he had thought, eyes finally slipping closed just as the reds and blues of sirens bled across the horizon, maybe it is. Maybe Jinyoung was a reverend holding him up by a poppy flower’s stem and reading him his last rites before he slipped from the world without a sound. _

Jinyoung _ , he tried to say. Tried to make that his last word. Tried to say the one thing that would mean the most.  _

_ But no words came. Jinyoung’s body dropped away from him as did the reds and blues of commotion, of blood on his t-shirt. He fell backward into the bottomless black of the world when it opened up and swallowed him whole.  _

  
  


***

 

He had been awaken quickly with a jolt when a door slammed somewhere in the house, drenched in sweat, chest aching in the place he’d seen the red stain blooming in the dream. It was strange: it was one he’d never had before, and the newness of it unnerved him. Something about having a new dream starring his own death on the day he was to interview for the position that would lead him to Jinyoung’s felt oppressively like a bad omen. 

Nevertheless, Jaebum got himself out of bed and dressed in the plainest suit he owns: a deep navy color like the middle of the ocean, buttoned at the waist over a crisp white button up shirt done all the way to his neck. He had blinked tiredly at himself in the mirror on his closet door—something Bambam insisted he needed—and tied a skinny black tie around his neck, forgoing the cuff links in a moment of sudden desire to stay as inconspicuous as possible. 

As he carried his duffle bag from the house that morning, despite his audience that watched silently and warily from their scattered positions in the kitchen and living room, none of them had any parting words. Jaebum stood at the top of the stairs that led down to their front door and waited; he saw the minute twitch in Yugyeom’s arms like he wanted to get up and say something, perhaps hug him goodbye, but there was a harder, more confused look etched into the lines of his handsome face, as if he could no longer recognize who was standing in front of him. And it hurt him, though he would never say so, that they had so little to say to him that none of them could muster up even a goodbye. Part of him wondered if they could see or sense the gun case packed quietly in between the layers of his clothes he’d folded meticulously to save space. 

Not even Jackson had any goodbyes for him: he looked away after a while, the muscle in his jaw knotted. Mark and Bambam both seemed to sense the tension in him and patted his shoulders at nearly the same exact time. 

So Jaebum’s goodbye was simple. He stood at the top of the stairs and watched them, each one of them, for a long time. Sometimes they shifted uncomfortably and looked away, but Jaebum wanted one last moment to study the angles of their faces as he knew them then so that he has something to hang on to. 

“Goodbye,” he said, almost to no one in particular. Jaebum took one last look like a picture burned into his brain and went outside to wait on the curb in front of their house for a car that would take him to a future that was so, so uncertain. 

  
  
  
  


The neighborhood that Jinyoung’s driver takes him to is upscale, to say the least, but quieter than he’d been expecting. Houses are relatively spread out on a road that inclines just slightly, startlingly similar to his own street, though these houses are much more secluded with high walls built of dark, wet looking river stones with an equally as dark and modern-looking gate at the end of long driveways. Jaebum finds himself surprised, just a little bit, although it would likely kill him to admit that to anyone else. He had thought Jinyoung’s house would have been bigger, more opulent.  _ Flashy,  _ Bambam would have said with a sneer and a flourish. Some great big hulking thing designed by the best architects that money could buy and on a sprawling lawn of intense green with sprinklers on timers even in the coldest of weather. The car stops outside of a house where the street has flattened out, only the very tops of the cubist structure visible from where he stands with his duffel bag clenched tightly in his grip. 

It’s not huge by any means, about the same size as the other quiet houses on the street, two rectangles next to each other connected by another in the middle made of glass, at least on the top; they’ll have to actually enter through the gate in order for him to see the rest, but years of catching glimpses of fancy houses in fancy home living magazines over Bambam’s shoulder gives him somewhat of an idea. He shifts on his feet and tries not to sigh. It’s  _ modest,  _ and that’s what bothers him the most: only a five minute walk from a brightly lit intersection lined with shops and convenience stores, the gentle mediocrity of Actor Park Jinyoung’s home already has his assumptions feeling threatened. 

The  _ gumiho  _ carved into the dark iron of the front gate laughs at him with beady onyx eyes. Jinyoung’s driver pays no attention to Jaebum’s discomfort, likely attributing it to interview jitters as Jaebum shifts again on his feet and looks away from the fox. He closes his eyes and tries to recenter himself as the call box embedded in the stone next to the gate crackles to life with voices on the other side. 

“State your name and business, please.” 

“Yah,” the driver barks informally, and aggressively enough that it makes Jaebum look over in surprise. “I know you can see me, you bastard. Are you really asking me for my name and my business?” 

There’s a staticy burst of laughter from the round speaker set into the wall above a numbered keypad. A face appears in the small square on top of both of them, showing both the driver leaning into the camera on the right and the security guard inside. 

“You know I have to ask.”

“You see me every single day, Minhyukah.” He looks over his shoulder, flat driver’s hat tipped backward on his head, giving him a quick up and down before turning back to the camera. “You’re wasting this guy’s precious time.”

“Yeah, well, Jinyoungie wastes everyone’s time.” 

The driver laughs, urging the security guard to remotely buzz the gate so they can open, but Jaebum has stopped paying attention. There’s something strange about hearing someone say Jinyoung’s name like that, in that fond way that Jaebum used to. For so many years of their life it was always  _ Jinyoungie this  _ and  _ Jinyoungie that.  _ The name rolled off his tongue easily, native in his mouth, as familiar to him as his own. He phased through nicknames, dropping vowels,  _ Youngie, Youngah,  _ the laziness of easy friendship and deeper than that, too. There is a fondness in the way the security guard says his name, a casualness to it that has lost its meaning to him over the years, and it is a visceral sound, the affection. There is a subtle cracking in his veneer that echoes faintly in the deep and empty chambers of his heart. 

Suddenly the gate is opening, turning his attention outward again, and he tries to shake off the feeling that it had given him. He stands in the same place by the back of the car and watches as the gate creaks open, revealing the front yard of Jinyoung’s house. There’s a long concrete strip of driveway that branches off to the side, leaving a large, gorgeous square of grass next to it that fits snugly up against the outer walls of the house. The glass that he had seen from the road seems to be a short walkway-slash-indoor patio that connects what would otherwise be two separate structures, one marble and glass, one wood. There’s an elegant wood-grain stained concrete porch nestled between the two that gleams almost like it’s wet despite the frigid sunnyness of the day.

Despite the curtains being pulled back on all of the visible windows, there’s no sign of Jinyoung lingering amongst the expensive furniture and art that Jaebum can just barely make out from where he’s still standing a little dumbly in the road. A strange sensation starts to prickle on the back of his neck as he blinks into the sunshine and watches a tall, well-dressed man step out from a small room built onto the opposite side of the wall near the driveway. 

_ This is real,  _ he thinks to himself, as though his brain has suddenly departed from the rest of his body, disconnected. There’s a certain surrealness that overtakes him and he clenches the strap of his bag tighter in his hand as the truth of it starts to settle oppressively on his shoulders like hands. Imaginary fingers dig into the skin underneath his collarbone as the man approaches them, his breath hard in his throat.  _ Jinyoung is really here somewhere. _

The tall man in the suit a similar dark navy to Jaebum’s comes to meet them at the gate, nodding politely to the driver in dismissal as he pulls a long, black coat a bit tighter around his waist. His hair is dark and styled handsomely in a dark undercut, short where Jaebum’s is long enough to tuck behind his ears. Heart shaped lips break into a smile when their eyes meet. 

“Hi,” he says, coming forward to quickly shake his hand and bow politely before motioning for him to follow. “Come in here, it’s a little warmer inside because the walls block the wind, but not much. I assume you must be Yoo Sejin?” 

Jaebum nods without hesitation. The driver has already departed, not even waiting until the gate has scraped itself closed with a shriek. 

“Yep. That’s me.”

The man nods at his bag. “Would you like me to take that inside for you? My name’s Son Hyunwoo, by the way. I’m Jinyoungie’s current head bodyguard.” He smiles this big smile and Jaebum’s stomach turns uneasily, Jonghyun’s words echoing through his head:

_ He’s just, you know… promiscuous, you could say. According to our sources, he likes to seduce his bodyguards the most. _

Jaebum shakes his head, both to clear his mind of Jonghyun’s warning and to answer the question. He doesn’t know that Jinyoung’s bodyguard would immediately realize that there’s a gun case in his bag, but he doesn’t want to take any chances.

“I’m alright. It’s not heavy. It’s nice to meet you, by the way.”

Hyunwoo laughs, a sound much… _ goofier  _ than he would have expected from someone so square and masculine. It puts him at ease a little, but on the heels of it, Jaebum can’t help but wonder how Jinyoung feels about that laugh, if Jonghyun’s little tip-off had any truth to it. Does Jinyoung like laughs like that? Does he like men that are manly and tough and blunt edged? It’s so hard to say. He hasn’t known Jinyoung that way in years and even when he did, they never really discussed things like that, and it’s safe to say that he doesn’t know Jinyoung in that way at all. Jaebum would like to think that not knowing Jinyoung as intimately as he thought growing up would make the strange sour-milk feeling in the pit of his stomach go away, but it merely sloshes around a bit and settles with a permanence.

“Lucky for you, the grounds aren’t really that big.” Hyunwoo motions vaguely with his hand. There’s trees lining the wall to the left and right of the gate, an added protection against the prying eyes of neighbors when they aren’t bare with winter. Hyunwoo is mostly right, though: the grounds aren’t that big at all, half a soccer pitch at most, a cozy little square of grass, trees, and shade cut out for Park Jinyoung in the middle of the city crush. “There’s not much behind as far as a backyard, since the house sits basically against the back wall, so there’s not a whole lot to look at back there. I’m going to show you around the grounds a little bit first, and we can talk along the way. Then I’ll introduce you to Jinyoung and he’ll show you around the house and where you’ll be staying.”

Jaebum can’t help but blink in surprise as Hyunwoo leads them to the small booth he’d stepped from earlier, walls made of the same stone surrounding the house and a single glass door, barely the size of two telephone booths put together. Hyunwoo holds the door for him as Jaebum asks,

“You’re not going to formally interview me?” 

“Nah,” Hyunwoo says, patting the security guard sitting at the desk full of monitors on the head. “Myself and the security team have already gone over your history and your paperwork, and you’re in the clear. Right, Minhyuk?”

The blonde guard waves him off, not turning around; Jaebum realizes he’s wearing headphones and likely can’t hear them as he watches the cameras. The whole wall in front of him is a bank of monitors, showing every possible angle of the grounds and outside the gate, but nothing for inside the house. Interesting.

“Doesn’t that seem a little, I don’t know. Irresponsible? My track record might look good, but that doesn't mean I’m a good fit. Personality clash, laziness. Things you can’t see on an application.” 

“Sure,” Hyunwoo agrees, crossing his arms and giving him a little smile, “but I’ve been his head of security for a while, and I’ve seen people come and go. You don’t seem lazy. Are you lazy?” 

He has no reason to lie. He shakes his head. 

“Exactly. As for personality? Well…” Hyunwoo trails off and shrugs. “Jinyoung isn’t always the easiest person to work with. He could stand to meet his match, I think.”

It startles a little laugh out of him. Jinyoung being hard to work with is more in line with the picture of him Jaebum had constructed over the years, and it settles a little bit of the uneasiness he’d arrived with. 

They don’t discuss Jinyoung directly so much after that, Hyunwoo focusing more on showing Jaebum the important things to know in the security booth, like where the emergency phone is and how to operate the keypad and gate, although he mentioned that Jaebum would rarely need to use it since there’s a guard on duty in the booth 24 hours a day.  _ Mostly just as a backup, you know?  _ Hyunwoo said with a smile, and Jaebum nodded, finding that words were coming up short when they usually weren’t. 

Sometimes, as they take a short tour of the grounds, Hyunwoo inserts a small anecdote here and there about Jinyoung, ones that humanize him and made him seem not-so-difficult as Hyunwoo had previously mentioned, but Jaebum wonders if that’s because there’s a fondness to the way that Hyunwoo tells him.  _ There’s the tree Jinyoung threw up behind after an award show,  _ he’d said, smiling almost to himself, small eyes curved.  _ That little shed is where Jinyoung keeps his summer lawn furniture, and every year on the first day of April he takes it out like he thinks the weather is going to change, and makes me help him set it up.  _ _ And that chipped mark on the patio refuses to come out no matter how hard he tries or how much money he spends; he slipped on the ice and managed to crack it with his brand new Versace derby shoes on. One hundred percent leather, and he ruined them within an hour because he didn’t believe me when I said they’d never hold on the ice like that. Busted his ass, his shoes, and the concrete. I had to take him to the emergency room to get stitches in his elbow and he somehow had the audacity to blame me. Can you believe that?  _

Jaebum could. He could believe that. There’s a cadence to the way Hyunwoo speaks of him, a warmth, only accessible from the heart, and Jaebum’s stomach clenches once again at the thought that Jonghyun’s warning could be truthful. So much of him wants to ask about it, to have the rumors denied, but thinks that interrupting Hyunwoo while he’s describing each location of the security cameras on the outside of the house would be rude. And, if he’s honest, transparent.

Even still, Jaebum is dying to know. Has Jinyoung touched this man’s heart to the point where he has driven him away from the business of protecting him out of love? 

Like Hyunwoo said, it doesn’t take long for him to show Jaebum around the outside of the house and get him familiar with the perimeter. The come back around to the front of the house from the back, Jaebum nodding along as Hyunwoo explains the multiple levels of security installed in and around Jinyoung’s home. Phone apps to watch cameras when they’re gone, motion sensors, silent alarms,  _ the whole shebang.  _ They come to a stop a couple of feet away where the concrete porch leads to the front door on the wood side when Jaebum’s mouth decides to carry on without permission from his brain. 

“If you’ve been his head of security for so long, why leave now? Couldn’t you just hire a new bodyguard?”

Hyunwoo squints up into the sunshine, cheeks pinked from the cold that still clings to the air despite the blueness of the skies. The smile that curls at the corners of his lips is a little forlorn. Wanting. Jaebum would feel guilty for asking but he doesn’t: he remains as steadfast as he always does, unblinking in his straightforwardness.

“It’s…” Hyunwoo sighs. “It’s complicated. I don’t want to expose too much of myself, you understand, I’m sure, since you’re a colleague at best and a stranger at worst. But it became a conflict of interest in the end, and I got an offer to work in America for a while, and it was best that I took it. Jinyoung, he…” he trails off again, closing his eyes with his face still turned up to warm in the sun. “He’s interesting. A little complicated. You spend all your time with someone and things...happen,” he blushes when he says this, peeking at Jaebum and then closing his eyes again, “things happen and it escalates to a point where you can’t be objective anymore, even though your sole job is to protect him. So I decided the best thing I could do for the both of us is move on.” 

Hyunwoo goes silent and Jaebum’s heart takes a dive. The way Hyunwoo explains it, the smallest taint in his voice of a grief he cannot or will not explain, reaches out to the familiar feeling in Jaebum’s chest and coaxes it to aching. It resounds with the same sort of pain Jaebum had felt when Jinyoung had left by choice, leaving them in memory, though different in that Hyunwoo is doing the leaving and Jinyoung the one being left. A hot stab of temper makes him hope that Jinyoung feels even a fraction of what they had felt and yet somehow knows that he doesn’t.

“Just be careful around him.”

Jaebum blanches inwardly a bit, keeping his face neutral. “I’m sorry, what?”

“He’s tricky. Like I said, he’s complicated. But he’s charming, too, frustratingly so. I’m not the first to fall prey to his charms and I’m sure I’m not the last.”

He says this last bit matter-of-factly, as though it’s just another security camera he’s pointing out to Jaebum, telling him to watch for it. So casual, so open ended and confusing, but all Jaebum can do is nod. Jonghyun’s forewarning had been true and somehow even worse than that: Hyunwoo had fallen in love with him, and this was the outcome. 

“I’ll be fine,” Jaebum says almost impolitely, to which Hyunwoo doesn’t really respond. “I’m here to work.” 

“I got that feeling from you. That’s a good thing, though, hold onto that––”

Halfway through his sentence, there’s the soft sound of a door opening and then a blur of color as someone goes careening into Hyunwoo’s side. Hyunwoo makes a shocked noise at first, not expecting it, but then laughs and wraps an arm around the back of their neck to pull them down into a playful headlock. A thick head of dark, wavy hair parted neatly just to the right of the middle spills over Hyunwoo’s forearm, covering their face even as two hands come up to try and pry him off. The pink of their oversized sweater seems almost out of place over the top of his dark, tight jeans rolled up at the ankles and in place next to the bruise tones of Hyunwoo’s suit. He laughs, ducking their head lower, a fond smile in his eyes as familiar laughter pierces the air like a knife. 

_ No,  _ Jaebum thinks deliriously, dread spreading through his chest like frost.  _ Not yet. Not yet. I’m not ready. _

“Hyung,” Jinyoung whines, shaking his hair out when Hyunwoo finally lets him go and he straightens. The hem of his pink sweater falls to his thighs, thicker than they used to be, filled out now that he’s older. Even still, Jaebum can see the thinness of them, still lean as he grew. “What are you doing out here in the cold?”

“Ah!” Hyunwoo says, seeming to remember with an embarrassed flush to his cheeks that Jaebum has been standing there the whole time. “I was showing around your new bodyguard and head of security.”

Time  _ crawls.  _ The space between Hyunwoo’s last word and the slow blink of Jinyoung’s eyes as he turns his head stretches out into infinity. Jaebum’s heartbeat slows impossibly, the pause between each beat countable in groups of threes. The winter air burns against his face and the wind holds its breath, anticipating the moment where Jinyoung’s head completes the turn and the dark coffee of his irises once again catch the light as his eyes open and fall upon Jaebum-not-Jaebum. Every inhale between the three of them is audible, punched through the silence, every movement of the world has stopped to wait for the moment he meets Park Jinyoung’s eyes for the first time in thirteen years.

_ I’m not ready,  _ he says again to himself. No amount of hate or bitterness or anything else could have prepared him for this. 

When his eyes open sleepy and deliberate like a slow-motion film, the first thing they land upon are Jaebum’s. Electricity strikes down the entire length of his spine like a lightning bolt, time racing to catch up to the seconds it had missed waiting with bated breath. Their eyes meet for the first time and Jaebum’s world tilts the most dangerous of fractions. 

Jinyoung blinks at him and Jaebum’s heart attempts to flee. After everything, every dream and harsh word and fight he’d had with the boys at home over this, and he hadn’t been prepared to look Jinyoung in the face. He likely never would have been prepared, each year that passed without him adding another layer of shock to the surrealness of it. As it is, thirteen years was nowhere close enough to prepare him for the way that Jinyoung cocks his head in a way so painfully familiar to him. 

No one says anything as they study each other. Jaebum is grateful that he has become the most disciplined of people, king of the bluff, not giving away anything on his face unless the boys drag it out of him or he voluntarily chooses to show it. Jaebum just blinks back at him, studying him in a way that looks clinical and not frantic. 

God, he has grown. Jaebum’s last memory of him is of a boy much skinnier than this, all painful haircut and the knocking awkwardness of knees and elbows. Shirts inherited from Jaebum or Mark hung off skinny shoulders, sometimes exposing a chest so shallow that the bones of his sternum were visible through his thin, tanned skin. Even in just a whine word Jaebum had heard the difference in his voice; though he’s heard the new, deepened octaves of it on television hundreds of times over the years, nothing could have prepared him for the way it would sound in person, no longer the high pitched tone of a boy on the cusp of breaking. Jinyoung has straightened and filled out in the places he could once feel the bones through, newly and leanly muscled in his hips and arms and shoulders. His face has sharpened, still soft in places, but has lost the roundness of childhood and tapered into the features of a man. 

Oh, but his ears. They are still the same, poking out from the thick waves of black hair. His lips are the same, too, currently pursed into a look of contemplation, one that Jaebum has to pretend he doesn’t recognize. These features, the sweet ones, the ones he had memorized by the time he was twelve and prayed to god never changed and didn’t. These are the ones that hurt him the most because they are fundamentally the same, a whisper of the boy he’d been before.

Jinyoung’s eyes narrow, the smile lines at the corners of them cut deeper with time. His head is still cocked with question and Jaebum steels himself for what is coming next.

“Do I know you from somewhere?” 

His heartbeat stutters. If Jinyoung recognizes him right away, this will never work, and there’s the possibility that he could get arrested, or worse, the boys will get hurt. Jaebum keeps his face blank as his mind whirs: had they planned for this, Jonghyun and their other superiors? Had they planned for Jinyoung being much smarter than they accounted for and given him an out if Jinyoung himself blew the thing wide open? But of course they didn’t––no one at headquarters even knew about their shared history with Jinyoung. Jaebum wants to be sure that Jinyoung won’t realize that it’s him––Jinyoung has grown, but Jaebum has grown, too, and much differently than any of them had expected. The blonde hair he’d had for years has gone, back to his natural black, and down to the middle of his neck in a length not even the boys had ever seen. His face is much sharper than it used to be, cheekbones and jaw more defined with age and the way he’d grown into his broad shoulders and lightly muscled body. The receptionist had taught him to hide the moles over his eyes which are arguably his most defining feature and, if Jinyoung could remember anything from their time together, it would be that; he had always told Jaebum in every way he could  _ hyung, those moles are my favorite, and I love them on you.  _ Jaebum was familiar to him, perhaps, but alien. Just another face he’d seen in passing at award shows or shoots or events, enough to trigger his memory but not complete it. 

“No,” Jaebum says, finality like a slammed door.

Jinyoung seems to look at him for a moment longer, as if wondering, before he shrugs and looks away. He turns to talk to Hyunwoo under his breath for a moment and Jaebum allows himself one solitary moment to feel relief.  _ Jinyoung didn’t realize it’s me. Maybe this is going to work.  _

“Jinyoungie…” he hears Hyunwoo murmur, audible, though the tone of his voice tells him it hadn’t meant to be. Jaebum glances over at him from where he’d been staring intensely through the grey, empty branches of the trees along the wall and watches the look on Hyunwoo’s face shift from light to something heavier, like pain.

“Mm?” Jinyoung hums, focusing on the way his arms slide around Hyunwoo’s neck, stretching ever so slightly onto his toes to reach. Hyunwoo seems to wince like it hurts but puts his hands on Jinyoung’s hips, anyway, as though he’s been conditioned to react to Jinyoung’s touch like Pavlov’s dog.

Neither of them look over at him, and all at once Jaebum feels as though he’s no longer standing there. He can sense the intimacy radiating off of them in waves; there is a different tone to Hyunwoo’s, his eyes on Jinyoung’s face and dripping with love and heartache, not dissimilar to one that Jaebum has known, too. Jinyoung’s face is hidden from him when he buries it in Hyunwoo’s neck but he can’t help wondering what it looks like. Does it match Hyunwoo’s, forlorn and empty? Is it blank? The way Hyunwoo spoke of his feelings gave Jaebum the sense that they weren’t mutual. Is it, perhaps, pitying? Jaebum feels guilty for watching them touch and murmur under their breaths, an interloper to a private moment, but there’s a tension to Jinyoung’s body that says he hasn’t quite forgotten Jaebum’s presence.

All at once, Hyunwoo shivers; Jinyoung’s face is still buried in his neck so Jaebum can’t be sure if it’s from standing out in the cold or because Jinyoung has started to kiss him, but there’s not an opportunity to gauge as he quickly steps away. He clears his throat awkwardly, face pinked as Jinyoung hangs off his arm and studies Jaebum quietly at his side. 

“Ah...sorry,” he apologizes, rubbing the back of his neck with the hand not occupied by Jinyoung’s. “I have to go now, but Jinyoung can show you around the house a little, if you’d like.”

Jaebum doesn’t move except to blink, feeling uneasy but not showing it on his face. He’s not exactly sure he  _ wants  _ Jinyoung to show him around: it would be better to just show Jaebum to his room and tell him where the bathroom is. The rest Jaebum can figure out himself; the less they have to interact, the better.

He goes to reply, but Jinyoung speaks first:

“Or I can just show you to your room. We don’t have to do it right away,” he says, and then his gorgeous lips turn up at the corners in a sly smile. “The house tour, I mean.”

Hyunwoo sighs in fond exasperation. Jinyoung giggles to himself. This is their back and forth and Jaebum isn’t sure that he’s ready to deal with something like this on a daily basis when he already feels the struggle of getting enough air in his lungs with Jinyoung standing just a couple of feet away.

“It’s fine,” Jaebum says, voice flat, as stoic as ever. He watches as Jinyoung’s eyebrows dip in dissatisfaction, as though Jaebum hadn’t responded the way he’d been anticipating.

“What is?”

“Either one.”

Jinyoung matches Hyunwoo’s sigh of exasperation. “Pick one.” 

God, that sound hasn’t changed a bit. It’s deeper now, with his voice, but the cadence of it echoes with the way a skinnier version of his chest and shoulders used to heave when he did it. Jaebum keeps his face stony and clear of anything when he replies, 

“I don’t care.”

Yugyeom’s voice, then, disembodied:  _ Oh, hyung, if only that were true.  _

Jinyoung, clearly frustrated, lets go of Hyunwoo’s arm and whirls on him. “Are you kidding me, hyung? This is my new bodyguard?” 

Hyunwoo glances at Jaebum and bites back a laugh. “Yes. Is there a problem?” 

“Are you  _ listening  _ to him?! He’s like a cyborg. He barely talks.” 

When Hyunwoo just pulls a face and shrugs, Jaebum feels like he could hug the guy. Watching Jinyoung’s brattiness being shot down by someone who loves him is utterly satisfying in the best of ways. 

“Ugh,” Jinyoung groans, rolling his eyes before turning back on Jaebum. “Tell me you’re just tired and you’re not actually this boring.”

_ Still not a quitter.  _ Jaebum remembers the way he used to sigh and give in easily to this kind of Jinyoung. 

Voice still flat and neutral, he says, “I’m fine.” 

“Oh my  _ god,”  _ he whines, clearly frustrated by Jaebum thwarting all of his attempts at dragging more words out of him. “Do you speak Korean? Are you having trouble understanding me and that’s why you’ve said the same eight words in a different order?”

Hyunwoo bursts into laughter next to him, which earns him a swift elbow in the side. “His name is Yoo Sejin, Jinyoungie. He’s from Jejudo. He’s Korean.” 

“Then why isn’t he answering me?” 

“Maybe consider not everyone  _ wants _ to talk to you, huh?” Hyunwoo teases, fingers wrapping easily around the lower end of Jinyoung’s bicep. “C’mon, Jinyoung. Take him inside. I have to go back to the apartment and start packing.”

Once again the world narrows down to the two of them, Jaebum forgotten. There is a strange sensation that begins in Jaebum’s chest, a deep burning, similar to the way he uses medicinal oils on aching muscle. Jinyoung meets his eyes once, the feeling flaring, before turning into the circle of Hyunwoo’s arm and looking up at him.

“You don’t  _ really _ have to go and leave me with him, right? You show him around the house and then let’s go down to the 7-11 and eat ramyeon at the counter.” 

His heart lurches uncomfortably.  _ Does he still like doing that?  _ So many of their late nights as teenagers consisted of scraping up coins to buy corner store ramyeon and standing shoulder to shoulder as they ate, stealing glances, sometimes competing to see who could eat the fastest, sometimes standing there for over an hour in silence with nothing but the white noise of traffic and eating between them.  _ He still does that? With other people?  _

The burning flares. The ache throbs.

“You know I do, Jinyoungie. I only have a couple more days here before I leave.”

Jinyoung sighs and tilts his head back a little. “At least kiss me before you go, then.”

Jaebum, who has been standing in the same position for nearly half an hour now, can finally feel the cold where it seeps into the bottoms of his leather shoes and through the elbows of his camel colored coat. Hyunwoo glances nervously at him and back at Jinyoung’s face, expression pinched.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea––”

Jinyoung rolls his eyes in Jaebum’s direction. “I’m sure Terminator doesn’t care.” He glances over, thick eyebrow raised. “Do you?”

_ Yes.  _

“No.”

“See?” Jinyoung purrs, and beams. “He doesn’t care. Now kiss me, asshole, and I’ll call you tomorrow when my shoot is over.” 

As it always has been, Hyunwoo can’t seem to resist Jinyoung’s charm, and the confidence in his words has him closing his eyes to lean in. For the first time that day, Jaebum can no longer stand to watch them: their lips meet, soft, and the tenderness of it makes him glance away. 

_ Do you care? _

_ Yes. Yes. Yes.  _

It aches, for a reason he cannot define, and as Hyunwoo finally pulls away and offers his goodbyes, Jaebum decides he has no reason to try.

  
  
  


“So,” Jinyoung says loudly once they’re inside, shoes left at the door and the both of them trailing through the eastern part of the house, all woody browns and whites to match the outside. They pass a beautiful kitchen, chrome and open, set toward the back and opposite an opulent sitting room with a fainting couch. Jaebum would like to ask him why he has that seeing as the fabric looks like it’s never seen the weight of a body in its lifetime, but he figures it’s just the excessive sort of thing rich people do. 

“There’s the kitchen,” he points out, leading him past it, every so often making a note of things for him but not stopping to dwell on it. “There’s a water cooler over there with hot water so you don’t have to wait to boil it. Oh, that’s the back door, but we don’t really use it since there’s nothing out there.” 

Jaebum just follows in silence, offering nothing but a slight nod of his head when Jinyoung glances back over his shoulder like he’s making sure Jaebum is still there. 

They pass through the glass patio that connects the two parts of the house, not closed in by doors except for the large one that swings open to the concrete patio in the front. It has a bit of a greenhouse feel to it, white wicker furniture placed by the windows and vibrant green plants hanging the ceiling and placed almost randomly around. Every so often there’s a pop of color: purples, pinks, yellows. There’s a humidity to the room that warms Jaebum’s neck under the collar. Jinyoung seems to notice him looking around and smiles almost to himself. 

“Do you like it?” 

“Huh?” 

His smile grows and Jaebum hates it. “This room. Do you like it? It’s nice, right?” he hesitates for just a moment, seeming to wait for Jaebum to answer and continuing when he doesn’t right away. He stops just before the step up into the other part of the house and gestures to the whole room, saying, “I designed it myself. No one ever believes me, but I did. Not the whole house, though. I bought it like this. But this room could have been anything, and I thought a sort of greenhouse was fitting. It’s pretty, right?”

It’s the most of Jinyoung’s voice he has heard unfiltered through a screen in  _ years.  _ He blinks, almost as though Jinyoung’s rambling had been a dream he’s trying to wake up from, and he nods. 

“I like it.”

Jinyoung sighs when he doesn’t elaborate, most likely hoping that Jaebum would have had more to say than that. When he doesn’t, though, Jinyoung just turns on a socked heel and continues leading him through to the other part of the house. 

“This side has all the bedrooms and stuff. There’s a room on the other side of the house upstairs, but that’s my parents’ room, so I don’t let anyone in there. The guest room and our rooms are all on this side.” 

_ Parents?  _ Jaebum almost asks, but realizes that might give him away. Jinyoung never knew his parents.

Instead, he asks, “do your parents come often?” 

His smile turns pained. “Sometimes. They’re not my real parents, but they took me in when I moved to the city, and they’ve been taking care of me ever since.” he shrugs and the pained look leaves. “They’re a little older now, so they don’t come as often.” 

Jaebum just nods, a bit thrown that Jinyoung would admit that to him so easily. Is it normal for him to be this trusting? Sure, Jaebum-not-Jaebum has been hired as his bodyguard by his former bodyguard ( _ and boyfriend?  _ His brain supplies, unhelpfully). But does he have to be so  _ open?  _

_ That explains that, then.  _

“Anyway,” he continues, weaving through the arrangement of sofa and chairs in an expansive, square living room toward the modern stairs by the far wall, “our rooms are upstairs. There’s a guest room,” he points to a door under the stairwell and then to another door set in a tiny alcove like a short hallway, “and the guest bathroom. Our bedrooms are up here. Yours is right here and your bathroom is down there.” 

They’ve hit the top of the stairs, a loft style balcony in front of the bedrooms that looks down over the living room and entrance to the greenhouse. Jinyoung points to the door to the left at the end by the window facing the front yard and to the two doors in front of them, clarifying with the one on the right. 

“That’s my room.”

He wonders vaguely if Jinyoung wanted him to inquire about it, but he doesn’t; instead, Jaebum nods again and reaches for the doorknob to the bedroom Jinyoung had indicated as his.

“Sejin-ssi?” 

Jaebum looks over his shoulder. Jinyoung is leaning against the railing, looking dangerously soft in the gentle light streaming in through the floor to ceiling window at the end of the hallway. Those black coffee eyes of his are trained on him and, for once, Jaebum feels like he’s standing on the wrong end of a barrel. 

“Yes?” 

“You don’t have to be afraid to talk to me,” he says, and so much of the annoyed confidence he’d had earlier seems to have stripped itself away, leaving a shy and tender thing much like the one he’d been when he was a boy and not a man. It frightens him, the  _ humanity  _ of it; he had built up this image of Jinyoung in their time apart of something more snake than man, a poisonous thing, and yet here in the soft afternoon light he could be the Jinyoung that cried when they kissed the night he disappeared from their lives. The uneasiness in which Jinyoung looks at him like he’s a thing that might bite makes the ache thrum in his gut like a plucked string. 

_ So much is resting on this,  _ he reminds himself, clenching his teeth.  _ So much.  _

He gives a curt nod, opening the door to his assigned room and stepping into it. Jaebum turns only slightly, glancing at Jinyoung, his face the stone mask he’d always trained it to be.

_ Clean break. _

“I’m not afraid,” he says, even though he is, his voice a cold and whistling void. “I just don’t want to.”

Whatever face Jinyoung makes in response to that, Jaebum doesn’t see it. He closes the door first, and then leans against it to close his eyes.

 


	6. 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's just the way it goes

 

In the morning, Jaebum is decidedly no longer concerned with the events of the previous night, already showered and dressed in an uninteresting suit the color of a collared dove. Whether or not his dreams were overflowing with the image of Jinyoung leaning against the thin railing or pinning him in place the night he left remains to be seen: he doesn’t remember them, and in any case they refused to be acknowledged. As he steadily knots a tie around his neck and gazes out the window to watch the sun finally break over the mountains, he remembers that there is no one here to read the imprint of his dreams in his body language, anyway, and feels only slightly relieved. 

At some point during the night, it seemed to have occurred to Jinyoung’s manager that he should text the new bodyguard about Jinyoung’s schedule for the next day, and so he had been woken up with the message flashing in his brain and again on his screen as though he hadn’t already confirmed:

_ Jinyoung has a shoot at 9am. He needs to be there by 8. Make sure this happens.   
_ _ -jae  _

Being that it’s still wintery, the sun has been slow to rise, and it is edging on seven am when Jinyoung has yet to make noise in his bedroom signaling that he’s awake. Jaebum assumes the hour gap between their arrival time and the start time is for wardrobe and makeup, which means Jinyoung requires little time to get out of bed and get dressed enough to leave the house. Jaebum taps his foot against the polished hardwood of the floor where he sits on the edge of an unfamiliar bed and waits. 

And waits. 

And  _ waits.  _

When there is still no noise of morning coming from Jinyoung’s room at 7:15, Jaebum heaves a sigh and goes to wake him up. He wishes that Hyunwoo or someone would have told him beforehand that this was part of the job: being responsible not just for his life but his schedule, too, and Jaebum feels a hot flare of annoyance as he unceremoniously pushes open Jinyoung’s bedroom door. Though the life-defending (ruse though it is) is more difficult in comparison, there is just something oddly infuriating about being held responsible for getting a thirty year old man out of bed. 

_ Especially  _ when it’s Jinyoung. 

Though in another life he may have stopped to admire the way Jinyoung’s full lips still part when he sleeps, black hair tousled out like a fan on a stark white pillow, he does not allow himself the luxury or the misery of it. He merely kicks the wooden leg of Jinyoung’s low and ornate bedpost hard enough for it to shift along the floor. 

“Get up,” Jaebum says, voice loud and commanding in the soft morning silence. Jinyoung’s eyebrows furrow and his eyes squeeze tighter beneath his mask but he doesn’t open them.

Jaebum kicks the bed again. 

“Get up, Jinyoung-ssi.” 

One chocolatey eye cracks open when the duck-printed eye mask is pushed up to his forehead and blinks sleepily at him before closing again. 

“Idonwannago,” he mutters. His lips barely move when he does, slurring it into one word. 

Jaebum wants to sigh but doesn’t. Something about it feels indulgent. 

When he doesn’t reply, both of Jinyoung’s dark eyes open and focus on him.

“Do I have t’go?” 

In a life that is not this one, it would be cute, the way Jinyoung blinks tiredly at him, laying on his back and silently begging Jaebum-not-Jaebum for the opportunity to go back to sleep. This thought is fleeting, though, and he shoves it away quickly as he stares down at him with a face that reveals no expression. 

“Ask your manager.” 

Jinyoung whines and rolls over into his stomach, burying his face in the pillow, and Jaebum pointedly looks away from the way his dark, wavy hair has cowlicked and curled over the course of the night into a mess at the back of his head. 

“If we don’t go, I promise to tell them it’s not your fault,” Jinyoung mumbles almost incoherently, voice muffled where he’s still face down on the bed and barely moving. The fabric of his picnic table patterned pajama set rides up his back, revealing a strip of skin marginally lighter than that of his arms and thighs. Jaebum tells himself he’s only studying this clinically, getting to know Jinyoung by the way he wears his clothes and not because the idea of it brushes uncomfortably close to a part of him he has worked too hard to bury. 

As if spurred on by this feeling, Jaebum feels his temper flare into irrational annoyance. How could Jinyoung be so much more frustrating than he imagined? He grinds his teeth together in an attempt to remain as neutral as possible: what would it say about him to be a bodyguard so quick to anger? 

“Get up, Jinyoung. You’re going to be late.” 

“Ah, Sejin hyung, c’mon—“

Something about hearing  _ Sejin hyung  _ come out of his mouth breaks off a delicate piece inside him, despite how hard he has tried to keep it together, and the anger of it pushes painfully at him like a joint popped out of place. His hands react before his brain can catch up; lip caught between his teeth, Jaebum leans down and curls the fingers of both hands in the backs of Jinyoung’s pajamas. The fingers of one hand brush against the skin of his neck, the fine hairs there like tiny nodes of power that only makes him curl his fingers tighter to fist the material of his shirt in his hand. The knuckles of his other hand touch his lower back, skin too hot like a fever that almost makes him pull away. Fueled on by the surge of a short storm inside himself, though, he lifts Jinyoung up with a grunt like Jinyoung weighs nothing and the weight of his hatred weighs everything. 

He dumps Jinyoung impetuously on the ground next to his bed. The younger man yelps, pushing up to his hands and knees after Jaebum steps back and innocently puts his hands behind his back and feels the satisfaction calm his nerves, just a little.

“What the hell?” Jinyoung says, face flushed red with visible anger when he gets up onto to his knees. He roughly pushes his eye mask off his head and lets it fall to the floor as he stares Jaebum down like it will make him react, but the action has settled him enough to return to the unmoving stoicism from before. 

“Don’t call me hyung.” 

With an eyeroll, he uses the bed to push himself to his feet. He doesn’t respond to Jaebum’s command, instead pushing out his lower lip as one hand rubs at his lower back underneath his shirt. 

“Your hands are cold.”

Whether or not he meant it innocently and honestly or as an enticement to get Jaebum to acknowledge the way he’d just touched him, Jaebum declines to bite. He merely looks past him at the door and says,

“Get dressed, please.”

“Can we just reschedule? I’m tired,” he whines, still pouting, but Jaebum isn’t looking at it and isn’t falling for it. Jinyoung already seems to have resigned, anyway, moving toward the door on the other end of his bedroom that must lead to a large, walk-in closet.

“Ask your manager.”

“You already said that,” Jinyoung says, sticking his head out of the door after disappearing inside it. 

“And I meant it. My job is to get you to where you need to go and make sure you don’t die along the way. Be dressed in ten minutes.”

Jinyoung's head doesn’t appear in the doorway again, but he can hear the wicked smile in his voice when he replies, 

“Oooh. Are you threatening me?”

Jaebum locks his jaw and leaves the room. 

  
  
  
  


He decides to wait outside in the driveway instead of in the house, not wanting the energy from the grabbing incident to linger. Jaebum lets his mind wander as he leans up against the huge Suburban, sleek and black and inconspicuous, huddled in his coat and resisting the urge to dig through his coat pocket for the pack of cigarettes he brought. He’s sure nobody would mind; one of the security guards assigned to the booth waves to him where he’s resting an elbow against the glass walls and puffing lazily. Not wanting to seem overly rude to someone who isn’t Jinyoung, Jaebum tips his head in a nod of acknowledgement before looking away. 

He wonders a little absentmindedly if he overreacted to Jinyoung’s inability to get himself out of bed on time. Worrying his bottom lip between his teeth as he gazes off into the middle distance in the direction of the house, he considers how he’s only been here for basically less than a day and Jinyoung has already seriously started to push his buttons. He doesn’t want to explore it too deeply lest he uncover something ugly and unwanted, so he shakes off the feeling that the warmth of Jinyoung’s skin has given him and chalks it up to not enough sleep and too much of Jinyoung’s attitude.

As if summoned by Jaebum’s exceedingly intrusive thoughts, he comes bounding out of the house dressed sharply in fitted slacks and a plain black t-shirt, arms covered by the black sleeves of a coat similar in style to Jaebum’s camel colored one. Stylish black sunglasses perched on the end of his nose make him look effortlessly more cool and rich than he had when he was pouting and rolling around the sheets with bedhead. 

“Hi,” he says, as though seeing Jaebum for the first time that morning. Jinyoung stops a few feet away from him, seemingly looking at him from behind the dark lenses, but without being able to see his eyes Jaebum isn’t really sure. It makes him uncomfortable in a way he can’t explain, anyway, and he hopes that if Jinyoung is also remembering the warmth of Jaebum’s knuckles against his neck, he doesn’t mention it.

“Are you ready?” 

With a happy sigh, Jinyoung looks up at the cloudless blue of the February sky and smiles faintly. “You know, you’ve said quite a bit to me this morning. Seems like you know how to talk, after all.” 

It’s exactly the kind of thing he should have expected. Jaebum refrains from rolling his eyes and merely opens the driver’s side door, sliding in and shutting the door on anything else Jinyoung’s stupid, snarky mouth had to add. 

By the time Jinyoung finally gets in the car and buckles in, it’s 7:45 and they’re definitely not going to be on time for him to get ready for his shoot, whatever it’s for. Jinyoung, of course, seems supremely unbothered by this: as the city passes by through the tinted window with the slow weaving of traffic, he seems content to rest his chin in his palm on the door and daydream. Sunlight glints off the surface off the river in a burning shade of gold, illuminating the outline of Jinyoung’s profile when Jaebum sneaks a look at him out of the corner of his eye for a reason he does not and will not acknowledge.

He does look, though. He again feels startled by the alienness of him, so different and yet so familiar. His permed, wavy hair is so much thicker and cut more maturely than the way he had kept it neatly buzzed through the early years of their childhood, and the curves of his ears through the strands of it makes his heart do a strange and nervous dance. Stopped at a redlight, he turns his head just barely to watch the pads of Jinyoung’s fingertips make contact with the poutyness of his lower lip as he taps them to it in an absent rhythm.

_ Stop. Stop looking at him,  _ Jaebum chastises himself. He grits his teeth and looks away.

They ride in silence for a while longer before Jinyoung is shifting in his seat, seemingly bored when he sighs and pushes his glasses up his nose. Jaebum doesn’t look when he reaches for the console and starts fiddling with the radio knob, flipping through stations as though he can’t decide what he likes. Suddenly, though, he hits the power button to turn it off and asks,

“Do you like music?”

Surprised by the sudden question, Jaebum answers. “Yes.” 

“Really?” 

It’s kind of annoying that he’s surprised. Jaebum has always loved music, only marginally less than he loves fist fighting, and Jinyoung always knew that about him, always tuned the radio to the stations Jaebum liked when he was feeling down. Jaebum actively reminds himself that for now, he is  _ not  _ Jaebum, but Sejin, and these are the things that Jinyoung does not know about him. 

“Yes.”

“What kind?”

“I don’t know,” he says warily, aware of the way Jinyoung shifts slightly in his seat as though to view him better. Jaebum knows that if he allows it, this will open more and more questions into lines of conversation into something that this should not be. “Everything.” 

_ “‘Everything’?”  _ Jinyoung asks, sounding incredulous. “I find that hard to believe, Robocop.” 

Jaebum bristles at the teasing nickname and doesn’t reply. He hopes his lack of response is enough to deter him from continuing, but another thing that has ceased to change about Jinyoung is his tenacious persistence. His  _ annoying,  _ tenacious persistence. 

After a moment, Jinyoung asks,

“So you’re from Jeju?”

_ I’m not, Jinyoung-ah, you know that.  _ But Sejin is, and he doesn’t. So he answers with the lies he had memorized in a manila file not unlike the one that held Jinyoung’s death sentence.

“Yes.” 

“What part?” 

“All of it.” 

Jinyoung seems like he wants to sigh at the clipped, terse nature of Jaebum’s answers, but doesn’t. 

“It must be pretty there. Do you miss it?”

_ Can you miss something you’ve never experienced? _

A wind blows through the cavern carved with feelings he never identified, and a voice suspiciously like Youngjae’s the day he confronted Jaebum in the kitchen whispers,  _ yes.  _

He doesn’t reply. 

Undeterred, Jinyoung asks something else, starting a rapid fire call and response of yes or no questions that has Jaebum clenching his jaw tighter and tighter with every single one. 

“Do you like animals?”

“Yes.” 

“Oh?” Jinyoung sounds surprised again. “What kind?”

“Cats,” he says, honestly, because it’s the one thing he can’t bring himself to lie about. 

“So you’re a cat person?”

He closes his eyes for just a moment, trying to keep from jerking the steering wheel to the left and sending them into oncoming traffic. Jaebum opens his eyes again and doesn’t look over at where Jinyoung is watching the side of his head. 

“Sure.” 

“Are you the kind of cat person who doesn’t like dogs?”

Jaebum’s fingers tighten on the wheel. 

“No.” 

Jinyoung does sigh, then, seeming to finally get frustrated with Jaebum’s lack of attention and conversation. This is a new development, he notes; in their time growing up together, there were moments of this, but more often than not he was content to lay next to Jaebum in the silence. This Jinyoung seems to hate it and babbles to fill the space it creates. 

“I’m not really an animal person,” he says, and Jaebum sees him turn his head to look out the window again as he speaks. “They’re okay. If I had to choose, I think I would pick dogs. They seem less bratty than cats.”

Figures he’d say that. Jaebum just blinks and doesn’t react. 

“But cats are cute too, I guess. Have you ever had a cat?”

He’s fed strays before and bears the marks of their claws in faded lines on his arms, but was never selfish enough to own one due to his line of work. 

“No.” 

“Do you want one?” Jinyoung seems to consider this. 

Jaebum is sure the knot in his jaw is visible now: Jinyoung won’t give up, and it is truly starting to dig under his skin like persistent and irritating insects. He glances at the GPS affixed to the dashboard and is relieved to see they’re barely fifteen minutes away from their destination. If he can stop Jinyoung now, maybe they can ride the rest of the way in silence. As such, Jaebum ignores the question and keeps his eyes focused on traffic.

After a few minutes of silence, Jinyoung takes a breath. 

“Are you gay?”

Startled, Jaebum accidentally taps the brakes too hard and feels the seatbelt lock tightly against his chest. He closes his eyes in disbelief, knuckles white on the wheel while he talks through his teeth. 

_ “What?” _

Jinyoung’s eyes are still hidden behind his sunglasses, but there’s a suspicious tightening around his mouth. 

“Are you gay?” 

Anger tightens Jaebum’s own mouth as he quickly looks away; he misses the smug upward tick of the corner of Jinyoung’s mouth before it falls into uncertainty again. 

“Are you serious?” Jaebum asks, incredulous. He knows that this is certainly going to open up a line of discussion he shouldn’t and doesn’t want to have, but the absolute gall of Jinyoung to ask him so bluntly after knowing Jaebum-not-Jaebum for less than a day has him feeling upside down. 

Exasperated, Jinyoung looks forward out the windshield and throws himself back into his seat. “Are  _ you?  _ Why are you so difficult? Trying to talk to you is like pulling teeth!” 

“Have you ever considered that your boyfriend is right?” Jaebum sneers, unwillingly snared in the trap of Jinyoung’s argumentative nature but too prideful to not fight back. His fingers tighten on the wheel again as he angrily flips on the blinker and moves into another lane. “Maybe I just don’t  _ want  _ to talk to you.” 

Jinyoung snorts derivatively. “He isn’t my boyfriend,” he replies, and doesn’t acknowledge the rest. 

“Could have fooled me.”

“Why?” Jinyoung says haughtily. The next part comes out in a sneer as ugly as Jaebum’s, “jealous?” 

“No,” Jaebum says through his teeth, his fingers starting to ache, although he doesn’t bother addressing the part of himself that flinches at a half-truth. “It just makes my job harder when you’re unattached.” 

The tension in the car is so thick it’s palpable, heavy in his hands where he itches to make it a physical fight and not a verbal one, and in his mouth where he wants to bite. Jinyoung scoffs at this and folds his arms angrily across a chest no longer thin with adolescence but shaped by a manhood Jaebum had never gotten to see.

“Whatever, asshole. I’m just trying to get you know you. How can you hate me so much already?”

“I don’t hate you,” he spits, but it even tastes like a lie. 

“Bullshit,” Jinyoung says, and knows he’s right. “I don’t get it. I’m just trying to make this easier. If we’re going to be around each other 24/7, why can’t you at least try to get to know me, too?” 

_ In one mile, the destination is on your right.  _ Only five more minutes in this traffic and they can leave this behind. Jaebum closes his eyes for just a moment, trying to breathe evenly. The silence stretches on in the wake of his lack of response and seems to warp into something morose without permission. 

Finally, Jinyoung says, voice sullen and oddly quiet, 

“You never answered my question.”

“Which one?”

He hesitates for a split second, just enough for Jaebum to notice. There’s a wavering of his confidence that Jaebum sees eerily reflected in himself and for a brief, unfiltered moment, he wonders how long he’ll be able to do this.

“The ‘are you gay’ one.” 

“Does it  _ matter?” _

If he has retained any of his old habits, he presses his lips together for a moment as he calculates an answer, but his previous thought keeps his eyes trained strictly on the road.

“A little bit.” 

There’s a blackened tinge to his tone, a melancholy that has suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and the suddenness of it takes Jaebum remotely by surprise. He glances over to see Jinyoung staring out in front of them where the lot has come into view, bunches of people with headsets and equipment and set scenes crowded together in the small, outdoor space. There is a pinkish flush to his cheeks now, too, hinting at a vulnerability that a suddenly angry Jaebum thinks he has no right to show. 

“It’s just—“ he chews his bottom lip a little; Jaebum stares at it. “I’m sure you guessed from yesterday that I am. It’s not so much important for you to be gay as it is for you to understand that I  _ am,  _ you know?” Jinyoung takes a shortened breath. “It was just a question. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.” 

It’s so unfair. It’s so fucking unfair he could cry, and he hasn’t cried in years. His fingers tighten again as he turns into the parking lot. It’s so fucking unfair for Jinyoung to do this, to be bratty and argumentative and selfish but then turn around so quickly and turn out his insides to Jaebum-not-Jaebum as though showing him the contents of his pockets. It is so unfair of him to worry his plump bottom lip with his teeth and continue to look forward, seeming so unsure, miles away from the cocky and arrogant man he’d been when they’d seen each other for the first time yesterday, the shadow of the boy he’d been passed over him once again. It is so unfair of him to chip away at the years of expectations he had built, to sit in the passenger seat and ask Jaebum to understand this when he can do anything but. 

When Jaebum finally pulls into a spot and throws the car into park, the silence has lasted for longer than it has since Jinyoung has started talking to him. He swallows hard and tries to carefully maneuver around the traps that Jinyoung’s emotions lay out for him so easily.

“Yes,” Jaebum says, finally, when Jinyoung has already grabbed the door. There’s a tall, thin man quickly approaching the car with a cellphone to his ear and a clipboard in his hand, hem of an oversized t-shirt stuffed into a hoodie flapping madly against the skinniest thighs Jaebum’s ever seen. He looks angry, and Jaebum can only assume it’s Jinyoung’s manager. 

Jinyoung looks over in surprise, hidden by his sunglasses and maybe a little bit of apprehension. 

“What?”

“I am,” Jaebum says, unsure why he’s admitting this. It could have been an easy lie, saying no, killing whatever desire that Jinyoung could have formed to try and seduce him as he’s been told that Jinyoung is known to do, but a part of him had ached at all the lying. There are some parts of himself that he can reveal without letting himself be caught and it lightens the weight that has settled across his shoulders, just a little bit. 

Jinyoung’s manager has reached the door, yanking angrily on the locked handle and barking muffled orders at him from the other side of the glass. Big, Harry Potter style wire frames slide down the slope of his nose as he yells at Jinyoung to  _ hurry up, idiot, you are so beyond late.  _

“You are—?”

Jinyoung looks at him. His sunglasses have slid down enough to reveal the soft brown of his eyes, meeting Jaebum’s across the thickness of a tension that hasn’t quite disappeared. He pretends not to notice the way Jinyoung’s throat works when he swallows, and he pretends not to notice that he notices. 

_ “Oh,”  _ Jinyoung says dumbly. “Oh.” 

Suddenly ashamed of his own vulnerability in the face of what he has been sent to do, Jaebum hits the door locks and allows Jinyoung’s manager to violently yank open the door so hard it creaks on the hinges.

“C’mon, Jinyoung!” he pleads, teeth chattering. He grips the top of Jinyoung’s arm and starts to pull him from the car. “You are so _fucked!”_

Laughing, Jinyoung allows himself to be pulled from the car by the scrawny, chicken looking boy that is Jinyoung’s manager. The moment has passed, whatever it is; there is no more of the vulnerability he had seen when Jinyoung chewed anxiously on his lip and admitted that he needed Jaebum-not-Jaebum’s understanding about his sexuality. It was an odd, intimate moment, and the suddenness of it leaves a bad taste in his mouth. 

“Sejin,” Jinyoung says, and Jaebum looks over to see Jinyoung gripping the door frame with one hand to hold him temporarily in place while his manager desperately attempts to pull him in the other direction. Their eyes hold again, the moments passing, a flutter in Jaebum’s stomach that he attributes to hunger and nothing more. 

A slow smile spreads on Jinyoung’s face and he is distressed when he can no longer read the meaning of it. 

“Thanks,” is all he says, and then allows himself to be pulled away, disappearing into the throng of people.

Uneasy and upended like a boat on choppy seas, Jaebum pulls out his private phone and attempts to call home. 

  
  
  
  


His first instinct is to call Jackson. In Jinyoung’s absence, Mark has always been more of the “right hand man” than anyone else (much to Jackson’s dismay, of course) though in a way that is more behind the scenes than it is glaringly obvious. Jackson has been Jaebum’s pillar: a visible thing for him to lean on, something tangible, a place to rest his worries where he didn’t have to hide them from everyone else and they could exist as they were with little effort. 

Jaebum fiddles with his private cellphone; the one he’d been supplied by the company before he took the job still attached to the dashboard of the car. His first instinct is to call Jackson to tell him about what has happened so far but he can’t. He knows out of all of them he has outwardly hurt Jackson the most, though he knows he has hurt them all in a way that is immeasurable in comparison. Though he knows the others are hurting, Jackson had been the one to show him the extent of the hurt, kicking and screaming and crying. Though he brought this upon himself it aches a little to know it.

Instead, he just sends Youngjae a text and hopes that he replies. It’s a quick and almost mindless thing,  _ hey Youngjaeyah, how is everything,  _ needing little else besides a status report to ease the wind chime banging of his nerves. Though he can’t explain exactly what it is, something about Jinyoung’s quick  _ thanks  _ before he got out of the car unsettles him. Is he being genuine? Facetious? Something else? It’s so hard to say. Before all of this Jaebum had been able to read him with his eyes closed. But now? It’s impossible to say whether or not the smile Jinyoung had given him was fake. 

Despite  _ feeling _ it for the last thirteen years, it occurs to him as he waits with a jittering knee that he truly no longer knows Park Jinyoung as he once had. 

Jaebum sighs and gets out of the car. Jinyoung hasn’t been gone for that long, but he knows the shoot isn’t a long one and that he’ll be done within the next hour or so, according to the frantic text messages Jinyoung’s manager had sent to his work phone with varying degrees of scary-calm. He pats his pockets for the pack of cigarettes, taking one out to light it as he leans against the driver’s side door and once again tries to analyze their conversation from earlier. 

His personal phone remains silent. It is a punishment he deserves but hadn’t expected.

Eyes squinted against the brisk wind and absently watching people pass back and forth on the lot, Jaebum considers the reasons Jinyoung could have asked him something so personal so abruptly. It’s not that he’s uncomfortable with the question, of course, because he isn’t; Jaebum has never been ashamed of it, except maybe in his early years when it was still something he didn’t quite understand. It’s just the matter of  _ why  _ that he can’t seem to figure out. Why ask? Why so soon? Why so…  _ aggressively? _

_ He told you why, dumbass,  _ he chastises himself, biting down on his lower lip while the cigarette burns down where he holds it between his fingers.  _ He even said because he just wants you to understand and doesn’t want you to hate him for it. _

But is that really all there is? Part of him says no. Despite Jinyoung not being exactly what he expected and systematically dismantling the assumptions he has made over the years, there is the bitter, black part of him that can’t let go and he searches for any hint of a hidden motive. 

Suddenly his phone vibrates in his pocket, derailing his train of thought. It startles him into dropping his cigarette and he puts it out with a huff of annoyance with the toe of his leather shoe before digging his phone back out of his coat pocket. His heart thumps paradoxically in relief and anxiety when he sees Youngjae’s name on the lock screen with a simple message:

_ Everything’s fine, hyung. Waiting for you to come back.  _

He watches the next message come in and his heart squeezes:

_ Be careful, ok?  _

He closes his eyes and leans his head back against the heavily tinted window of Jinyoung’s car. He doesn’t deserve it and he knows he doesn’t deserve it, but Youngjae has expressed concern, anyway. Youngjae had even said that they’re waiting for him to come back and he deserves that least of all. It would make him feel good if it didn’t make him feel so oddly guilty. Where he had once been so sure footed and headstrong about this, it seems his balance has started to waver. 

Jaebum chews his lip thoughtfully. Is that because of Jinyoung or because he misses Youngjae and the boys? It’s just because he misses the boys, right? He’s only been with Jinyoung for a day. Sure, Jinyoung has surprised him a little, but at the end of the day, he’s still the Jinyoung who abandoned him when he needed him most. 

Without answering, Jaebum puts his phone back into his coat pocket and gets back in the car to wait for Jinyoung out of the cold. He stares ahead blankly, considering, and decides that he hasn’t really changed his mind about Jinyoung after all. 

 

***

 

By the time Jinyoung is throwing open the car door an hour and a half later, Jaebum has decided that any momentary lapse of judgment and feeling he was having was due to the strangeness of missing the boys back home, and has nothing to do with Park Jinyoung being back in his life after thirteen years of dead air. 

Nothing to do with it at all. 

“God, that took forever,” Jinyoung grumbles, buckling his seatbelt rather aggressively and slumping in the seat. The same ray-ban style sunglasses he’d been wearing that morning are still perched on his face, but his hair is parted differently; it’s more down the middle now than off to the side giving him the illusion of fringe, but the permed waves are still in place, and Jaebum thinks fleetingly that paired with his new dark turtleneck and tight jeans, he looks more like an actor than he could have ever imagined. 

As if sensing Jaebum looking at him and not saying anything, Jinyoung turns his head away from where he’d been waving at his manager and then playfully flipping him the bird. He lets his sunglasses slip down his nose far enough to look at him over the gold rims. 

“What?”

“Nothing,” Jaebum says, though Youngjae’s suspicious, disembodied voice whispers  _ liar  _ in his ear. 

Jinyoung, as though he’s not in the mood to continue the assault from earlier, pushes them up his nose grumpily and throws himself back in his seat again. “Whatever.” 

Part of him wonders if the bad mood is concurrent with the photoshoot because he isn’t a fan of them in general, or if something bad happened while he was there to piss him off, or if his interaction with Jaebum-not-Jaebum had soured over the duration, or maybe all three. Either way, in a complete 180 from when they’d first arrived, Jinyoung seems to have nothing to say to him. 

After they’ve left the lot and are on the way back home, Jinyoung seems to fidget and get tired of the silence. Jaebum wonders if he’s become one of those people that just can’t stand to be in the quiet, constantly having to fill up the space with words or music or  _ something,  _ and what could have happened to make him hate it so much. When they were younger and carefree and together, they could lay in the silence for hours. It was always together, but it was silent. Jinyoung now seems to hate it and have a deep rooted need to fill it with something other than static. 

He continues to ignore Jaebum, though, which is fine by him. Jaebum only glances at him from the corner of his eye as Jinyoung tires of looking out the window with his chin in his hand and digs his cellphone out of his pocket. There’s a split second of hesitation that Jaebum catches even without looking at him and then he’s holding the phone to his ear with his shoulder, hands preoccupied with one another where they pull at the edges of his sleeves. 

“Hi, hyung,” Jinyoung says, and his voice has slithered from the tired stoniness he’d come back from the shoot with to a sickly sweet honey purr that makes Jaebum’s neck prickle. “The shoot is over.” 

There’s a pause and the tinny sound of a voice, but Jaebum can’t hear it very well. Jinyoung waits and then replies, 

“I said I would call you, remember? Yeah. Wh—oh, no, Jae was super pissed off but what’s he going to do, fire me?” he barks a fake laugh like  _ ha!  _ before continuing, “no, he’s right next to me. I don’t know, maybe he just wanted to drive.”

Jinyoung moves the phone away from his mouth and looks at him through the black mirror lenses of his sunglasses. “Did you fire my driver?”

“No,” Jaebum says tersely. “Why would I fire your driver?” 

He shrugs and looks away. “Then why are you driving?”

“I trust myself more than I trust your driver.” 

Jinyoung snorts and tilts the phone back to his mouth. “Did you hear that? He doesn’t trust the driver apparently. Yeah, yeah. Whatever. So do you want to come over still? I know you have to pack, but…” he trails off, listening. muttering in confirmation every now and then to the tinny voice on the other line. “Oh, sure. He doesn’t care. Do you care?”

Jinyoung is looking at him again. Whatever it is, Jaebum is sure he doesn’t, and doesn’t look over when he replies, 

“No.” 

“See? C3PO doesn’t care. He’s just my bodyguard, not my father.”

Jaebum’s fingers tighten on the wheel. Just a fraction. 

_ It’s the traffic. Traffic is stressful.  _

“Yeah. We’ll be home in like twenty minutes. Can you come then? We can….we can watch a movie,” he says, but drops his voice lower in a way that feels like warm honey pooling in his ear; Jinyoung turns his face away, toward the window, when he says it, and Jaebum realizes that it is not an innocent suggestion. 

Not at all. 

_ C3PO doesn’t care,  _ he’s said, and it dawns on him that he meant about  _ this.  _

“Yeah, hyung,” Jinyoung murmurs, face still turned away like he’s getting privacy from Jaebum overhearing. He still can’t hear the person on the other end but he has guess that it’s Hyunwoo—based on the baritone he can hear through the small earpiece and Jinyoung’s voice dripping with desire now. He also vaguely remembers Jinyoung mentioning it the day before but for some reason, he hadn’t really expected it. 

“I probably still have some, so you don’t have to bring it. But, you could always bring it just in case we don’t…” Jinyoung trails off, head turning just the smallest bit in Jaebum’s direction like he has finally remembered he’s not alone in the car. He seems to think better of this and adds, “in case we don’t make it. So just bring it. Or I can make Sejin-ssi get it…” there’s a sharp burst of  _ no! No, no no!  _ On the other end that’s actually audible, and it makes Jinyoung honk out a braying laugh. “Fine, fine. I won’t ask him to. Yeah. Yeah, we’re pulling up right now actually, so you can come now.” 

Jaebum tries not to speculate on whatever it is that Jinyoung had said he would or wouldn’t ask him to do, knowing that it was probably far beyond his job description. Jinyoung taps an uneven rhythm against his denim clad thigh with the fingers not clutching his cellphone as the large, iron gate creams open upon their arrival. His mood has seemed to shift again: it seems tiresome to Jaebum, to be constantly flipping between extremes, from moody to lusty to nervously excited. If Yugyeom or Youngjae had been able to read his mind, they’d laugh at him for being a hypocrite. 

The car has barely stopped moving on the long strip of Jinyoung’s driveway when he opens the door and jumps out, leaving Jaebum to park the car in silence and then make his way into the house by himself. The kitchen and entryway are still dim, gently lit by sun streaming in through the windows but no lights on, and Jinyoung’s shoes are already neatly placed against the edge of the tile just inside the door. Jaebum slowly takes off his shoes and blinks: he feels tired all of a sudden, heavy in the arms and legs, and isn’t sure why. As he toes off his shoes into a neat pair next to Jinyoung’s and studies the difference between Jinyoung’s glistening leather and fringe and the matte black of his own, he wonders if he’s more unsettled by their earlier conversation than he thought. Maybe he didn’t get enough sleep? He should be able to just brush something like this off, but… 

“Sejin ssi!” Jinyoung calls from the other side of the house, distracting him from where his thoughts had begun to wander off on their own. Looking away from the neat coupling of their shoes, he quietly makes his way into the living room where Jinyoung is perched curiously on the couch with the television remote held loosely in one hand.

Jaebum just looks at him. There’s something oddly... _ intimate _ about it. Jinyoung is sitting on his knees, coat removed and hanging over the arm of a high-backed chair in a clean mint color, as though he’d discarded it on the way. His socked feet are hidden where he’s sitting on them, legs folded underneath him, one hand splayed on his thigh for balance as he points the one holding the remote in his direction. A strange swirling starts in Jaebum’s stomach at the sight of Jinyoung doing something so inherently innocent but making it look so…. _ so… _

“Hey,” Jinyoung says, waving the remote. “Did you fall asleep standing up?”

Maybe he is more tired than he thought. Jaebum shakes his head and looks at Jinyoung’s face instead of the curve in his lower back. 

“Umm,” he hums, blinking. “No.” 

Jinyoung shudders with exaggeration. “Creepy.”

“Do you need something?” he asks, voice neutral, trying to round them back to the point of why Jinyoung had called him into the room. 

“Yeah,” Jinyoung sighs and mimes throwing the remote to him. “Can you help me figure this out? I’m pretty okay with technology, but it’s a new TV and I haven’t had much time to sit down and learn it all yet. If you can get it to Netflix, I’ll love you forever.”

Something about that makes him itch.  _ I’ll love you forever.  _

_ Ugh.  _ Jaebum wants to decline just on principle after hearing him say that, but he just steps forward and gently takes the remote out of Jinyoung’s hand. Thankfully the younger boys have been obsessed with the newest and most up to date gadgets, constantly replacing things they own and all use in the house with the newest and most updated versions, so while Jaebum isn’t Youngjae’s level of tech god, he knows his way around.

Whatever Jinyoung did to the TV has it totally backward and screwed up, though, and might take a second to figure out since they don’t use this brand at home. Jaebum sighs a little and decides to just sit down, glancing to make sure he has room before pulling the material of his pants up near the tops of his thighs and perching on the edge of the couch at Jinyoung’s elbow. 

Two things occur to him then: one is that Jinyoung’s eyes are on him, though Jaebum won’t look at him so he’s not sure exactly where, but the way Jinyoung’s head is facing tells him he’s probably looking at his legs accentuated by his dress pants or the shoulder closest to him covered still by his suit jacket and coat. The other thing is this:

This is the closest he’s been to Park Jinyoung in thirteen years. 

_ In thirteen years.  _

The warmth from the side of Jinyoung’s body at his side suddenly feels too hot, burning his elbow when it brushed against Jinyoung’s when Jaebum lifts the remote to point it at the TV. The heat from Jinyoung’s gaze, either appraising or disapproving, singes on his skin in the places he can feel the gaze. His exposed ankles, his wrists, his neck; Jaebum prays that the length of his dark hair where it’s currently tucked behind his ears covers the tattoo just below it, knowing that Jinyoung has no qualms about asking him uncomfortable questions. Stomach turning, Jaebum tries to quickly get through the television menus.

“Sejin ssi,” Jinyoung says quietly, and Jaebum can feel his arm where it moves against his. Jaebum feels the feather light ghost of Jinyoung’s fingertips at the ends of his hair like he means to brush them away but hesitates. “What’s this on your neck?”

Out of reflex, Jaebum turns his body a little and grabs Jinyoung’s wrist with the hand not holding the remote. He doesn’t look over and continues to flip rapidly through the menus until he finds what he’s looking for, ignoring the way Jinyoung’s breath catches and his body stills at the contact. 

“Don’t touch me.” 

Jinyoung twists his wrist in Jaebum’s vice-tight grip, more like he’s testing the feel than he is trying to escape from it. 

“Sorry, hyung, I was just curious—“

Jaebum finds the option for Netflix and clicks on it, bringing up the home screen and then throwing the remote onto the low glass coffee table in front of them. His stomach is absolutely rioting now, flipping over and over, a tiny boat on massive waves. Jaebum uses his grip on Jinyoung’s wrist to roughly shove it back into his chest and let go. They’re looking at each other, now, Jaebum’s expression hard and lined with anger a contrast to the way Jinyoung looks surprised and maybe a little hurt. But he refuses to let it touch him. He’s been caught off guard by Jinyoung too many times already. 

“Don’t call me hyung, either.” 

He watches Jinyoung’s expression change: surprise to hurt to anger to resignation. The younger man just drops both hands in his lap between his thighs, shifting so that his legs are crossed and he sinks back into the soft, velvety cushion of the couch and looks away. 

Eyes on the TV and not Jaebum, who stands up to step away from him, Jinyoung says, 

“You sure do have a lot of rules. ‘Don’t touch me’. ‘Don’t call me hyung’. You’re not very fun.” 

Ignoring the last part he replies, “and I have more. Don’t break them.” 

Jinyoung huffs a laugh with little humor in it, saying, “I don’t even know what all of them are,” but seems to drop it when Jaebum does not respond. 

Jaebum would love nothing more than to go into his room and avoid all of this. He would love to shut himself up in his room at home, even, surrounded by the few things he does have that are exclusively his, and feel the warmth of a bed he’s had for years. But duty is duty: Jaebum would be a hypocrite to throw away a job because it was too hard or the target too frustrating. Unseen circumstances come up every so often and despite not being prepared for them, they always found a way to combat them. He tells himself that he can combat this. He has to. 

_ Do it for them.  _

No longer next to Jinyoung, Jaebum lets his shoulders drop a bit as he leans against the wall. Though part of his job description includes being able to give Jinyoung space in the house if he wants it, both Jonghyun and Hyunwoo had told him that part of bodyguard protocol was to stay in the room until you are dismissed. As much as he wants to go sit in his room until time to do a nightly perimeter walk and drown out everything that had happened that day with the pretty stereo across from the bed, he has to stay until Jinyoung tells him to go. Jinyoung having that kind of power over him makes him itchy in the worst of ways, but Jaebum merely folds his arms across his chest and leans against the wall, trying to clear his mind of every single thing but  _ work.  _

Jinyoung hasn’t moved beyond leaning forward to get the remote, returning to where he’d sank into the back of the couch. From where Jaebum is standing against the wall he has quite the view: he can see most of the entire living room from the back, the television haloed by the soft light coming in from the floor to ceiling windows facing out into the yard. All he can see of Jinyoung is is dark, wavy hair where the shorter strands have flopped onto the soft beige of the couch and his hand as he holds it up and flips through movies. 

“What do you want to watch?” Jinyoung asks, casually, as though they hadn’t just gotten into some kind of weird pseudo-fight, and like Jaebum hasn’t just broken some kind of conduct by grabbing Jinyoung so roughly. 

Jaebum doesn’t answer. He just watches as Jinyoung flips through a list of action films, hovering over some to read descriptions before moving on. 

When he doesn’t answer for a long time, Jinyoung leans up on an elbow to turn around and look at him. He opens his mouth to say something else, God only knows what, but gets distracted by the sound of the front door and Hyunwoo’s  _ Jinyoungah, I’m here  _ as it precedes him entering the room. 

Jinyoung’s face folds into a smile when the taller man enters. He notices Jaebum standing against the wall, still dressed in his suit and coat, and takes his hands out of his own coat pockets to greet him with a polite bow. 

“Hello, Sejin ssi,” Hyunwoo says, seeming much more nervous now that they are not meeting on such professional terms. “Have you been well?”

Sometime in the last five minutes, Jaebum’s teeth had started grinding together. He offers a curt nod and nothing else, effectively shutting off all lines of communication. 

Jinyoung seems to notice this and rolls his eyes, which Jaebum sees since he’s propped up on an elbow and has his head turned toward where Hyunwoo is still standing in the entryway between the green room and the living room. 

“Ignore him, hyung,” Jinyoung says, voice no longer bored but dropped down into that same honey purr from earlier. “In fact, pretend like he’s not here. Put your coat on the chair and come sit by me.” 

Jaebum grits his teeth harder; despite it not being directed at him in the slightest, something about it still feels backhanded, as though Jinyoung is trying to irritate him on purpose. It’s not supposed to be working, since Jaebum’s objective is to come here and get close enough to him to take him out and then wash his hands of it, but he had severely underestimated just how much history he was going to have to trudge through before he could disconnect from it. 

Hyunwoo, at least, seems embarrassed. His cheeks are a little pink when he lays his coat over the top of Jinyoung’s, broad shoulders a little tense under a dark orange turtleneck. Jinyoung turns back around away from Jaebum and pats the couch beside him and laughing quietly when Hyunwoo looks away from Jaebum with an awkward smile and obeys.

Now that neither of them are facing him, Jaebum feels like he can maybe actually get through this. He doesn’t know how long Hyunwoo plans on staying or how long Jinyoung plans on keeping him here, but he knows at some point Jinyoung will tire of Jaebum hovering and not want to be under the watchful eye of his bodyguard, and he’s hopeful that Jinyoung will dismiss him sooner rather than later so that Jaebum can do other things while locked in his room. The television flashes as Jinyoung picks a movie; he settles into Hyunwoo’s side, who wraps an arm around his shoulders and pulls him in closer. Jaebum looks away from this and acts like he hadn’t seen it as he starts to daydream about the list of things he needs to do later before he can go to sleep. Tidy up his clothes, check his wallet, clean his gun… 

The easiest way for Jaebum to disconnect from a situation where he needs to be quiet and still for long periods of time is to go step by step in his head cleaning the sleek, silver gun he carries with him in various holsters, be it the one that criss-crosses his back to rest on his ribs, or the one that straps around his leg and keeps it tucked neatly at the top of his thigh. That one is the least conspicuous so he doesn’t wear it often, resorting to the body holster or the regular cop-style hip holster. Explosions and car crashes go on in the background, covering up the sound of the two of them murmuring while Jaebum blinks and pictures the way he’d take apart his gun, laying each piece on a cloth just for the occasion, inspecting every piece by hand––

Sudden movement from the couch in front of him breaks his concentration. Jinyoung has sat up and swung his leg around Hyunwoo’s waist so that he’s straddling him, facing in Jaebum’s direction but not looking at him. Jaebum’s heart drops into his stomach as the movie keeps rolling on in the background and Jinyoung slides his arms around Hyunwoo’s neck, who uncertainly brings his hands up to the indent of Jinyoung’s waist. There is a look on Jinyoung’s face as he tilts his head to the side a little, lips and hips moving, that Jaebum recognizes, as he’s seen it on the very few people he’s slept with over the years when the opportunity presented itself. It was never something he sought out; part of him realized but didn’t understand or accept that intimacy like this was futile unless there was sustenance, and the one person who had most likely been the person to provide him that had abandoned them like they were nothing, and so it became an empty thing that happened only when it _just_ _happened._

Based on both the warning of Jonghyun and Hyunwoo, though, and Jinyoung’s very feeble attempts so far, it seems that Jinyoung is the opposite. He craves it, it seems, based on the way he’d called Hyunwoo before they’d even let the lot, and based on the way that he’s leaning down to kiss him with a filthy noise while Jaebum stands all of six feet away. Jaebum’s stomach turns and hardens as he tries to look away from Jinyoung’s mouth when he pulls away and allows Hyunwoo to lean up and kiss the exposed skin of his neck under his jaw. 

The movie was obviously just a cover, since it has totally been forgotten as Jinyoung moves in Hyunwoo’s lap, hands restless where they move from his dark hair to his neck to dig his fingers into his wide shoulders. Jaebum grits his teeth and tries to just pay attention to the movie despite missing a lot of it, and it’s hard to keep his eyes from wandering when Jinyoung keeps moving and blocking some of the television from his view. Their breathing is heavy now, too, finally audible over the loud car chases and shouting and gunshots; Jaebum can hear the way Jinyoung whines when Hyunwoo does something with his hands he must like, and he glances at him when Jinyoung’s back bows and he tips his head back with one hand grabbing onto the couch for dear life.

“Ah, hyung,” Jinyoung pants, and the sound of it, so deep and breathy and hot, pierces Jaebum in the gut like a needle. Jinyoung brings his head back down, and he realizes the only reason he can tell that Jinyoung’s eyes are nearly completely black with lust is because Jinyoung has caught Jaebum and is looking right at him.

Neither of them say anything, but there’s the annoying little curling at the corners of his lips that says he knows Jaebum has been looking, even if he’s trying to act like he isn’t. Their eyes hold as Jinyoung’s body rolls, Hyunwoo making a choked off noise in his throat, oblivious to the staring contest they’re having over the top of his head while he runs his hands up Jinyoung’s lean body under his dark sweater. Hot, prickling warmth drips its way down Jaebum’s spine, coiling his muscle up like molten springs, but he refuses to let any of it show on his face. He remains tight lipped and stoic even as Jinyoung licks across his bottom lip and moans openly, top row of white teeth visible above his tongue. 

“Jinyoung-ah,” Hyunwoo grunts, pushing impatiently at his sweater, but Jinyoung keeps his hands firmly on his wide shoulders and continues to roll his hips in his lap, yet to break Jaebum’s eye contact. He seems to realize this, belatedly, and throws his head back hard into the couch and groans. 

“Jinyoung-ah…” he says, trailing off, voice watery with want. Jinyoung looks down at him, finally looking away, grinning and rolling his body. “Jinyoung-ah, should we really be–oh, fuck–should we be doing this in here?” 

Jaebum watches with fire roaring in his gut as Jinyoung tilts his head, the picture of false innocence. “What do you mean, hyung? It’s my house.” 

Hyunwoo shifts, adjusting him on his lap, and Jaebum gets a much unwanted flash of Jinyoung’s taut, flat stomach where his sweater is rucked up around the bottom of his chest. He grinds his teeth and stares emptily at the screen; turning his head away completely would give Jinyoung the win that he so clearly wants and, once again, Jaebum falls victim to his own pride. 

“Yeah, but…” Hyunwoo tries to say, breaking off with a shaking, breathy moan as Jinyoung moves one of his hands off of Hyunwoo’s shoulder and it disappears down between them and out of Jaebum’s view, but he has and idea of what’s happening when Hyunwoo’s breath quickens. “But does your bodyguard have to stand there?” 

“You were my bodyguard once,” Jinyoung teases, shoulder rising and dropping with the movement of his hand. “Should I ask him?” 

“Jinyoungie––”

He looks up again, arm still moving, and looks Jaebum dead in the eye with those black, terrible obsidian pools. His mouth twitches at the corner, feeling triumphant, as though he somehow knows that the sight of him on Hyunwoo’s lap and his little noises and expressions are working on Jaebum, lighting a firestorm in his belly, though Jaebum’s face has yet to give anything away. 

“Sejin ssi, would you like to stand there?” he says, purposefully breathless, and grinning, too. The implication is in every punctuated syllable:

_ Do you want to watch? _

Jaebum gets a flash of what he’d  _ actually  _ like to do, and it involves a lot less Hyunwoo and a lot more of holding Jinyoung down with two hands on his windpipe. 

Blank, Jaebum responds, “I’ll do whatever my job requires me to do.” 

He cocks his head in the other direction, faking the innocence, long neck visible from the stretched out collar of his turtleneck. Jaebum wants to snap it. 

“What do  _ you  _ want?”

Jaebum blinks. He wants to look away, wants to hit him, wants to hit  _ something  _ to break the tension running through his entire body like a dropped livewire. Instead he just sets his mouth and replies, almost sounding bored,

“Whatever my job requires me to do.”

This clearly dissatisfies Jinyoung: the smart smile drops, eyebrows furrowing, hips stuttering in their rhythm where he’d been rolling them in Hyunwoo’s lap oblivious to the man below him trying to get his attention. He sighs at Jaebum’s lack of reaction and looks away. 

“You can go, then.” 

Immediately Jaebum shoves himself away from the wall, passing by the couch and giving it the barest of glances out of the corner of his eye as he goes to the stairwell and climbs up it stiffly. Jinyoung has seemed to erase him from the moment as soon as he was dismissed: even as Jaebum is climbing the stairs and throwing open the door to his room, Jinyoung is taking off his sweater and throwing it to the floor with loud, whimpering moans of  _ hyung, hyung, hurry up and get me naked.  _ Jaebum slams the door to his bedroom a little too forcefully to be neutral but he’s taking it on good faith that Jinyoung isn’t paying attention, so he angrily turns the lock and crosses the room to sit on the edge of his bed. 

As he shoves the heel of one hand into his eye and the other against the base of his half-hard dick, he wonders if Jinyoung is being this loud on purpose: even from upstairs and with his bedroom door closed he can hear him, panting and whining over the sounds of a movie slowly playing itself out in the background. The pressure of his hand against his crotch hurts, pressing harder, willing himself to stop thinking about it and for it to go away and stop betraying him. Jaebum grinds the heel of his palm down along his length and gasps at the same time as Jinyoung from downstairs when pleasure-pain blooms in his gut and he pulls his hand away, fast. 

He stands up quickly, face red, about to start pacing when he catches a glimpse of himself in the shining chrome of the radio sitting neatly on its shelf across from the bed. Jaebum nearly jumps at it, quickly twisting the knob for the volume at the same time he presses the power button and changes it to CD. He’s not exactly sure what’s in there but at this point he doesn’t care; he only wishes that the bathroom was connected to the bedroom instead of down the hall so he could pass through in peace and take an ice cold shower to clear the wildly oscillating pinwheel of his thoughts. 

Instead he just takes a deep breath and holds it. He cranks the volume dial up higher and higher until he can’t hear the movie anymore, and neither of their voices underneath it, before letting the breath out and shuffling backward to lay on the edge of the bed and stare at the ceiling either until he falls asleep or it’s time to get up and do the nightly perimeter check. He hopes Hyunwoo is gone by then, but as Jinyoung has shown him in just the past 24 hours, hoping for an outcome has nothing to do with whether or not that outcome is going to come true.

The radio aches through the speakers as Jaebum stares at the ceiling, some older sounding music from England somewhere, probably, based on the accent. Jaebum tries to focus on the words: 

__ You’ll never believe me, so why don’t you find out for yourself?  
_ Sick down to my heart  
_ __ But that’s just the way it goes…

And finds that it does nothing to help him. They’re just a little too close to home for him to be comfortable with examining, so he goes back to tuning it out and listening to the melody instead.

  
He just closes his eyes and wishes for a dream that is something other than  _ this.  _


	7. 6

 

There is so much about what happened that Jaebum doesn’t understand. The main thing being  _ why, _ of course, but he thinks that he could ponder the question of why for the next ten years and never get a real answer. They’ve been together barely for a day, and already it’s like this? He wonders if the warning he’d gotten from Jonghyun and Hyunwoo had time parameters. Jinyoung usually attempts to sleep with his bodyguard after this many days. Sometimes he tries to sleep with them after this many. 

Who knows. It’s hard to say for sure and he’d never ask. 

In any case, as much as he would like to  _ not  _ be thinking about the way Jinyoung’s eyes had held his while he ground his hips into someone else, it unfortunately sticks with him in the age old dog-chases-tail circling of thoughts as he slips from the house to do his nightly patrol before going to bed. Mercifully the house had been silent when he did: Hyunwoo was no longer there, presumably long gone or perhaps splayed across Jinyoung’s bed in a deep, satisfied sleep. 

Not that it matters, of course. Hyunwoo could have been asleep half naked on the couch as Jaebum left his room in just his slacks, undershirt, and a coat to do his nightly duty and it would have mattered just as little. 

But, thankfully, the living room is empty, dim, and quiet when he emerges. Listening carefully he can hear Jinyoung softly banging around in his bathroom, likely getting ready for bed; the part of him that refuses to just lay down and be quiet feels glad for the emptiness and wants to say why. But the part of him that remembers how it felt to be abandoned by Jinyoung at the tender, tender height of their adolescence carefully lays a hand down to suffocate it. 

He pads quietly through the house in his slippers, mind whirling, once again invaded by the thought that he had underestimated what this was going to be like and if he could really do it, after all. His coat swishes audibly against his knees as he passes through the green room connecting the two sides of the house, slowing a little to take in the sight of it: gauzy, transparent curtains have been pulled across the long panes of glass, thin enough to let the light from the streetlamps outside throw shadows across the plants and chairs. The faintest tinge of warmth lingers between the leaves of the plants, trapped in by the glass on both sides. He pauses for just a moment, peering through the window to the guards outside in the yard as they greet each other to switch shifts, and considers returning here later in order to find some calm in the crepuscule. 

Outside, Jaebum pulls his coat a little tighter around his waist, a short breeze blowing through the empty branches of the trees lining the walls of Jinyoung’s property and raising goosebumps on the visible skin. He greets the night guards with little more than a nod and a short wave before he disappears around the corner of the house into the dark. If it weren’t for the large, stone walls blocking the property in on a square piece of land he’d be more worried about the lack of outdoor lights on the sides: there’s not much beyond what the streetlights make visible in the shadows, but there’s enough security between cameras and on duty guards (and, to be fair, himself) that he lets it go.

As he’s rounding the corner of the back of the house to come around the other side and into the front again, his personal phone starts to buzz quietly in the pocket of his slacks. Jaebum furrows his eyebrows and pulls it out to look at it: his heart takes a steep, quick dive in his chest when an old photo of him squished up against Jackson lights up the screen underneath his name. Of all the people back home he wouldn’t have ever expected Jackson to contact him first, knowing that he has outwardly scorned Jaebum the most, and is capable of holding a grudge far longer than anyone else he’s ever known. So it surprises him, first and foremost, but it also makes him anxious. 

He picks up immediately after that, phone to his ear and other hand holding his coat closed at his belt. “Jackson?” 

“Hello, hyung.”

Jackson’s voice is...normal. A little stiff around the edges, but normal; he doesn’t sound like he’s under any emotional duress (other than what Jaebum is currently putting them through, he thinks, and winces a little), and other than it  _ feeling  _ a little awkward, nothing major seems to be wrong. But even through the sheet of ice that Jaebum has perfected to fit this exterior, his boys have always been able to pierce it with little effort.

Audibly nervous, Jaebum chews his lip and asks, “what’s wrong? Did one of you get hurt?”

“No,” Jackson says, more neutral than he’s ever heard him, and this is what worries him the most. “Nobody’s hurt. We haven’t even taken any jobs since you left.” 

He’s been gone for less than two whole days so this doesn’t surprise him, really, but it comforts him in a way he didn’t know he’d needed, nonetheless.

“Oh.” Silence fills the space between them as Jaebum makes his way back to the front door, pausing with his hand on the doorknob. He’s not sure what to say: last time he’d seem them, they’d turned away from him in the kitchen and had nothing to say, and the last thing he did have to say involved Jaebum not coming back if it really came down to it. Where he had once been convinced that this would eventually all blow over, Jaebum finds now that in no time at all he isn’t sure if he can fix what he’s done.

Jaebum closes his eyes and leans his forehead on the dark wood of the door, knuckles tightening to white where he grips the cold doorknob. “Jackson-ah, why did you call?” 

“What, I’m not allowed to call you? Now I  _ am  _ hurt,” Jackson says, but the lame attempt at a joke falls obviously flat between them. Jaebum doesn’t move and Jackson sighs heavily when there’s no reaction. 

“I was serious, but whatever––”

“I didn’t mean anything by it, I just––”

_ I know you’re hurting and it’s all my fault and I don’t know what to do or say to make it okay again because I can’t trust myself anymore. _

“I––”

“It’s fine,” Jackson interrupts abruptly, and Jaebum opens his eyes to trace the patterns in the glossy wood as Jackson continues, “I was just calling to see if you’d changed your mind yet.”

“About what?” 

“You know. Killing part of our family.”

This is an obvious bite in attempt to get a rise out of him, and after the events of the day, Jaebum is just too tired to take it. “I haven’t changed my mind.”

“Are you sure?” 

Jaebum sighs. “Jackson, I don’t know what makes you think I would change my mind after being here for just a couple days––”

He’s interrupted again, this time not with irritance but a heavy-hearted desperation tinged ever so slightly with misery. “Because I know you. I know you. I know you think you’re a certain way. I know you think you’re just a cold-blooded killer, but you’re not. You’re not who you think you are and I know you know that, too, deep down. You think you can do this, but you can’t. Isn’t that what you’re thinking now? What has he done to you to change your mind? I bet it barely took anything––”

_ “Jackson,”  _ Jaebum growls, gripping the doorknob so hard he feels like he could tear it off if he tried. Jackson’s voice has risen, quickened, kicked up into the same fierce, tenacious rush it had been when Jackson had fought with him in his room over the same thing. He has so much conviction, too, so utterly confident in his words that he hadn’t even had the sense to say them politely, and each one in his accented Korean feels like a punch to the stomach. 

_ You’re not who you think you are.  _

“What, are you gonna tell me I’m wrong?” he asks hotly, and Jaebum can picture perfectly the redness on his cheeks as he does. 

“Yes,” he replies, but even to his own ears it sounds lackluster. Robbed of the usual heat it would have contained had  this happened before he left, before he was in Jinyoung’s space and caught glimpses here and there of the boy he’d been and the man he’s become.

But he’s not wrong. And though he’s too proud to admit it, in their heart of hearts they both know it. 

“You’re such a liar,” Jackson says vehemently, and suddenly it’s too much: all the events of the day, Jinyoung searching him for chinks in his armor and desperate to dig his fingers in, trying to use sex to achieve it, slipping them up underneath and pulling so hard he feels like his skin is going to come off. In anger, Jaebum pulls his hand from the doorknob and slams his fist hard against the wood.

“God  _ dammit,  _ Jackson, let it go!” he shouts, and though he doesn’t mean to, it happens anyway. The side of his palm smarts and he leans his forehead against the other end of his closed fist and tries to recompose himself. “Jackson, I––”

“Fuck you, hyung,” he says, as coldly as Jaebum’s ever heard him. There’s so much more loaded into those three words, something to the tune of  _ I hate you  _ and  _ Now I really hope you don’t come back.  _ They’re both smart enough to pick up on the subtext despite the words not actually being said.

Before he can even attempt to say anything else, Jackson hangs up on him, leaving him to lean up off his hand and swallow the lump in his throat underneath a heavy sigh. Jaebum slips his phone back into the pocket of his slacks and rubs his eyes roughly with the heels of his hands before opening the door and stepping back inside. 

He fully intends to go straight to his room and go to sleep, postponing his shower for the early morning in hopes that just going to bed will make him feel less like there’s a cheese grater against the already raw endings of his nerves. Jaebum untucks his white undershirt from his slacks, halfway through shouldering off his coat to hang it up on the hooks just before the greenroom when he catches a glimpse of Jinyoung’s shadowy figure sitting in one of the white wicker chairs by the back window. 

His heart drops. Jaebum hadn’t even entertained the possibility that Jinyoung would still be awake or out of his bedroom, which is stupid when he considers that this is Jinyoung’s house and he’s free to do whatever he wants. He hopes that he can just pass by without engaging him; there’s nothing he’d rather do less right now than even look at him, but he only manages to get halfway through the milky moonlighted glass room when Jinyoung is calling out to him, soft as cat’s paws on the carpet. 

“Sejin-ssi.”

He could keep going. He could ignore it, keep going and up into his room, close the door and throw the lock to forget this night had ever happened. But much in the way that he had when they were growing up in each other’s shadows, he feels compelled by some otherworldly force to stay. 

“Sejin-ssi. Who were you talking to just now?” 

He turns his head ever so slightly: Jinyoung is watching him with his knees drawn up, chin resting on them and his arms wrapped loosely around his ankles. Half in shadow, the only thing he can see in the darkness of him is the gleam of his eyes where they are trained on him like the laser sights of a shotgun. The rest of him, half of a dark sweater past his wrists and shorts that barely meet the tops of his thighs, a deadly piece of modern art hanging out of place in this room full of humid, green life. Jaebum swallows and puts his hands in his pockets just to give them something to do.

“Why?” 

“It sounded serious. Were you guys breaking up?” 

His hands turn to fists in his pockets. “No, but that’s also none of your business.” 

“Oh?” Jinyoung’s voice changes with interest. “So you’re still together, then?” 

Jaebum licks his lips angrily and tries to hold back on everything he could say right now, because every single one would blow this whole thing to hell. “No. We were never together to begin with. Why does this matter to you? Go to bed.”

“Remember when I said you’re my bodyguard and not my father?” Jinyoung says, and even shadowed where he sits Jaebum can feel the razor sharp curve of a smile on his lips. “I’ll go to bed when I feel like it. Right now we’re having a nice conversation. Aren’t we?” 

“No,” he says, hotly, nerves rubbed raw and wanting so badly to yank his hand out of his pocket and swing at him, to draw hot, red blood turned grey in the moonlight. “We’re not.” 

“I heard you yelling. Was it bad?” 

“Don’t worry about it.” 

“I can’t worry about my bodyguard?”

Every moment he stands here winds him tighter, one synapse snipped after the other, revealing a quickly fraying thread. “No. Because I know you don’t actually care.” 

“Look, if you’re having trouble with your boyfriend because you’re working for me, you can always quit––”

“Don’t you have your own boyfriend to worry about, Jinyoung-ssi? Stop trying to pry into my life.”

The icy tone of Jaebum’s voice seems to dig at him, because he sits up in his chair and lets his feet hit the floor with a quiet  _ smack.  _ Now visible, his thick eyebrows are pulled down in anger when he says,

“I already told you, he’s not my boyfriend. I don’t have a boyfriend.”

Jaebum snorts with little humor. “Try telling him that.”

“You know what?” Jinyoung says, hands on the arms of the wide chair to push himself to a standing position. “I think you are jealous of him. I keep telling you he’s not my boyfriend but you insist he is, getting pissed off when I bring him up or bring him around––”

He’d stepped closer at this point, not close enough to feel the warmth coming off of him but close enough that he can see the tension in his neck and the rough, shallow heaving of his chest as he tries to regulate his breathing. His anger is so unfounded it’s almost funny, except that it’s the complete opposite of funny and Jaebum thinks distantly that if his hands weren’t stuck in his pockets right now, he would have dropped Jinyoung to the floor already. A giddy sort of fire burns its way up his throat as Jinyoung rambles on and on, fingers flexing at his sides and rolling his wrists in the way he used to when he was gearing up for a fist fight. If Jaebum felt threatened at all he’d step back but if anything the sight of an old habit just makes the anger dig deeper. 

Annoyed by his lack of response, Jinyoung shoves impatiently at Jaebum’s shoulder with an open palm. Jaebum lets himself be pushed and doesn’t react, merely returning to his original position and staring at him in the half-dark with his bottom lip pulled tight between his teeth and his jaw locked. 

“Say something,” Jinyoung barks, challenging him; Jaebum isn’t sure what exactly he expects to get out of this or where this frustration is even coming from, though he can guess. Jinyoung is used to having his bodyguards fawn over him, likely vying for his attention or even just giving it up freely, and he’s become so accustomed to it that it bothers him when he doesn’t receive it. Everything that he’s tried to do so far has met so much resistance, Jaebum-not-Jaebum’s disinterest etched into every hard line of his body except in moments of surprise like when Jinyoung had caught him looking. He had even thwarted Jinyoung’s attempts at getting to know him, only giving away the most mundane and trivial of answers, something that Jinyoung’s entitlement could not comprehend. 

“C’mon, asshole,” Jinyoung says doggedly, pushing at his shoulder harder, and the last of Jaebum’s nerves snaps like a broken guitar string. 

With a growl Jaebum removes a hand from his pocket and slaps Jinyoung’s hand away, hard, forcing it back to bounce off Jinyoung’s chest. 

“Do you get off on making people uncomfortable?” Jaebum asks aggressively, his voice wire thin with barely controlled rage. Jinyoung’s eyes are wide in surprise. “Huh? Do you like it? Do you like trying to push me around and pissing me off?” 

“Sejin––”

He should stop now and just go to bed, but it’s too late; the last edges of his patience has been sawed down, rubbed away to the rawness, exposed and bleeding. Both hands come out of his pockets to run through his hair and pull angrily at the ends. 

“What do you want, Jinyoung? What do you want? I’m not here to be your friend. I’m not here to fuck you––”

“That’s not even what I want!” Jinyoung shouts, interrupting him, but Jaebum just raises his voice in response:

“Bullshit! That’s bullshit! Hyunwoo warned me about you, did you know that? He warned me that you’d try to get me to sleep with you, and it took you less than a day. Is that why you hired me? To fuck?” Jaebum pushes his hair back again with one hand and lets the shorter pieces around his face fall across his forehead. “I’m here to––” he chokes, so worked up he almost forgets to lie, and tries to blame the stutter on his rage, “––to protect you. Not be your friend. Not to be your lover and sleep with you. I’m here for one fucking reason, Jinyoung, so stop trying to piss me off. Stop trying to pry into my life.”

“Is it so fucking bad?” Jinyoung shoots back, eyes shining like he’s going to cry, but Jaebum thinks it’s more from the anger and the embarrassment of finding out Hyunwoo had outed him than any hurt feelings at Jaebum’s tirade. “Is it so fucking horrible that I want to get to know you? We have to spend all our time together, why can’t we at least try to get along? It’s barely been two days and we’re already fighting!” 

“Because you’re insufferable!” Jaebum shouts at him. He feels so out of control now, anger scorching hot like the burning surface of an oil spill. “God, you’re insufferable, Jinyoung, it’s not wonder Hyunwoo is leaving!” 

“He isn’t leaving because of me!” Jinyoung argues. “He’s leaving––”

Jaebum interrupts with a harsh laugh. “What did he tell you? Because he told me he’s leaving to get over you, since you can’t seem to keep it in your pants long enough to settle down.” 

Jinyoung’s expression ices over when the last of Jaebum’s words leave his mouth. The implications of it hang between them, heavy in the silence that forms, waiting for one or both of them to break. 

“He told me he was leaving because he got a better job opportunity…” Jinyoung says quietly, somehow much closer to Jaebum than he previously had been, his swallow suddenly audible. He looks confused and maybe a little hurt, but Jaebum doesn’t care; he’s past the point of caring, wanting to dig his fingers into an open wound and deepen it to the bone. 

“Yeah, well, he lied,” Jaebum remarks sharply, and sees the color rise in Jinyoung’s cheeks even in the lack of light.  “See how it feels when the things people say to you are bullshit?” 

Though maybe he should have thought to expect it, he never actually sees it coming: all at once Jinyoung has moved, cracking an open hand across Jaebum’s face so hard that it jerks his head to the side and makes his neck pop uncomfortably with the sudden movement. The skin immediately begins to sting and burn in the shape of Jinyoung’s fingers. His thin chest heaves beneath his sweatshirt, eyes really wet now, burning like diamonds at the bottom of a black lake as Jaebum runs a hand over his slapped cheek. 

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jinyoung breathes, voice deep but shaking, arm pulled back like he’s going to slap Jaebum again despite whatever comes out of his mouth next. “Don’t act like you know me––”

Rage boils over in Jaebum’s chest, spurred on by the handprint welting on the skin of his cheek, nearly invisible with the grey light of the green room but hot and raised with blood. Quick as lightning Jaebum grabs Jinyoung’s wrist where it has winded back toward his shoulder and twists; Jinyoung yelps as Jaebum uses his grip to shove him back hard against the window facing the backyard with a dull  _ thud  _ against the glass. The curtains groan on their rods way above their heads as Jinyoung’s body pulls on them as Jaebum pins him down to the frosty window with a forearm across his chest and grinding the bones of his wrists together in his fingers. 

He leans in so close he can feel Jinyoung’s warm, labored breath on his lips. His own dark eyes bore into Jinyoung’s, burning like falling stars, holding Jinyoung’s body back with the weight of his own. He’s so angry and filled with fire that he barely registers the heat of being pressed together chests to stomachs to hips. 

“If you ever hit me like that again, Jinyoung-ah,” he says as calmly as death, the nickname slipping out so easily that neither of them realize it, “you will regret it.” 

Jinyoung’s free hand fists in the loose hem of his t-shirt, knuckles brushing the skin of his bare hip above his belt. He grunts and pushes up against Jinyoung harder to trap his hand. 

“Make me regret it right now, then,” Jinyoung breathes unevenly, face flushed and head tipped back against the window to elongate his neck. “If you mean it.” 

With a disgusted noise, Jaebum shoves off him and steps back; he roughly pushes Jinyoung’s hand away from his shirt when he tries to tighten his grip on it and then runs both hands through the length of his hair. 

“Since you obviously can’t keep your hands to yourself,” Jaebum says evenly, letting his temper simmer, “let’s set some fucking ground rules. One, don’t call me hyung. I’m not your hyung, I’m your bodyguard.”

Jinyoung just watches him, both hands pinned behind his back now against the window, a heat outline of his body in the frost. 

“Secondly, don’t touch me. Ever. If you ever hit me again, I’ll kill you.”

Jinyoung laughs bitterly. “That’s the first thing I’ve ever heard you say that actually sounds sincere.”

_ Oh, Jinyoung, if only you knew.  _

“Third,” Jaebum continues, raising his voice with the intention to ignore anything Jinyoung has to say, “stop trying to get to know me. If you don’t like the fact that I don’t want to fuck you, then fire me. Do you understand?” 

Their eyes meet again, both of them flushed; Jaebum thinks that if this had happened in another life, perhaps, maybe it would have ended differently. Jinyoung’s knuckles on the skin of his hip mere centimeters above his belt would have sent heat flashing in his guts, the warmth of Jaebum’s heavy body on Jinyoung’s against a cold window an oscillation of feeling. But they are not in that when, and its time, if it had ever had any to begin with, has passed. 

“Sejin––”

“Yes or no?” 

“I won’t stop trying to get to know you,” Jinyoung says defiantly, and Jaebum can see the way his hands fist behind his back by the flexing of his shoulders. “Because I have to be with you twenty-four-seven. And I think you’re a liar.” 

“A  _ liar––?” _

“But if it helps you sleep at night to feel like you got one over on me, then fine. I won’t call you hyung. I won’t slap you again, unless you deserve it.”

Jaebum opens his mouth to argue, trying to think of a situation where he’d ever deserve to get slapped like that again, but thinks better of it. Jinyoung seems to take his lack of response as a forfeit and grins at him in the milky dark.

“If you hate me so much, you could always quit.” Jinyoung says this like he knows he won’t, though, and the back of Jaebum’s neck prickles. “But you won’t. Will you?” 

“I need the job,” he says stiffly, hands back in his pockets and anger burning out quick and leaving nothing but the exhausted coals. 

“Right.” There’s a beat of silence before Jinyoung shifts. “Sejin––”

“No.” Jaebum turns on his heel,  too tired to stay, too tired to keep engaging him like this, knowing that with every second he remains and every reply he allows him, Jinyoung will keep pulling him in, goading him, trying to get the reaction that he wants out of him like he just had. He’s not sure if Jinyoung is too dumb to realize what he’s doing or if he’s smarter than Jaebum is giving him credit for and that  _ he’s  _ the stupid one, all of a sudden, but the longer he stays and lets Jinyoung pull power over him, the more it seems like the latter. 

“I’m going to bed,” he says coldly, turned away with his eyes closed. “You have a schedule tomorrow. Get yourself up for it, because I won’t. Don’t speak to me unless you have to. I can communicate with your manager directly if I have any questions.”

“What if I have questions for you, though?” Jinyoung asks to his back, as Jaebum refuses to turn around and drag this out any longer than it has already gone on. Jaebum grinds his teeth together and doesn’t reply; he keeps walking, through the living room and up the stairs with the heat of Jinyoung’s stare on the back of his neck the entire way. Once he gets into his room and closes the door behind him with the lock turned his knees nearly buckle: dizziness hits him like wave, from exhaustion or being emotionally drained or both. He catches himself on the wall with one hand and presses the heel of the other into his eye so hard there’s kaleidoscope bursts of color against the black of his eyelid.

What had Jackson said?

_ You think you can do this, but you can’t. Isn’t that what you’re thinking now? What has he done to you to change your mind? I bet it barely took anything–– _

What  _ hasn’t  _ Jinyoung done, except pull him back and forth like a children’s candy, doing everything to mold him between his hands into a new shape, one he doesn’t recognize. Every expectation he’d ever built of Jinyoung in the thirteen years he’d been the sunbleached photo in  their memories has been destroyed in barely two days, burned down to the rubble with hardly any effort at all. As he makes his way to the bed on shaky knees he wonders what the truth of it all is: is Jinyoung who he says he is, who he tries to be? Is Jinyoung trying to be someone that he thinks Jaebum thinks he is? 

_ You think you can do this, but you can’t.  _

Jaebum lays on the bed and throws an arm over his eyes, not bothering to take off his pants or belt, exhaustion in the very marrow of his bones. He jumps when there’s a light knocking on the wall above the headboard and he hears Jinyoung’s voice, musical and arrogant muffled though it is:

“Goodnight, Sejin.” 

Jaebum squeezes his eyes shut and feels the piercing pain in his heart. He had come to play a game of cat and mouse, but he no longer knows which of them is which.

 

 


	8. 7

 

He dreams. 

  
  


_ The soccer field outside of the gymnasium where Jinyoung, Jackson, and himself have just graduated from is crawling with students. There’s a low roar of tears, excitement; shouts and screams and laughter rolls past the three of them as they push their way through crowds with their arms linked. Jinyoung is laughing at something Jackson said, gown still zipped to the neck, almost tripping on the length of the shiny black fabric while his other hand fights to keep the titling graduation cap on his head. There’s a happiness in the sound that makes Jaebum’s stomach roll and he isn’t sure why. Around them, the flashbulbs of cameras explode in rapid succession like lightning.  _

_ Flash. Flash. Flash.  _

_ Everything is so familiar, a memory in disguise of a dream like so many he has had before; the starkness of it is almost frightening, the over saturation of the sky before a storm. They finally make their way to the end of the field, where Mark is waiting against the goalpost with the younger boys all roughhousing in front of him like a trio of impatient puppies. Jaebum laughs when Bambam throws an elbow into Yugyeom’s stomach; the sound of it makes them all look up in unison and bound over with little barking exclamations of  _ hyung! Hyungs! You did it! 

Yeah we did,  _ Jinyoung says with a smile, pulling his arm out of Jackson’s and hugging them. _

God, it almost hurts, the painful realism of it. He rolls restlessly in his bed. 

_ Bambam is still so small, barely fourteen and as short as a twelve year old, a total contradiction to thirteen year old Yugyeom that towers over Jinyoung already. He allows himself to be swallowed up in a group hug while Jackson and Mark hug each other a little shyly in the offensive artificial brightness of the lights.  _

_ He lets himself drift for a moment. Jaebum looks first at Mark and Jackson, still embracing, Mark’s arms loose around his shoulders and talking to him with their foreheads nearly touching, and then at Jinyoung, who lets their youngest friends pull and poke at his graduation attire with half-hearted teases. There’s a general sense of happiness that seems too big for the atmosphere, despite being outside. It seems infinite, ever stretching, pushing against the soft cage of his ribs until he thinks they might collapse with the feeling. A small smile pulls up the corner of his mouth at the thought of their later celebration when the youngest boys were sent home and the four of them could drink their stolen liquor until the sun came up and they could no longer walk.  _

_ Jaebum thinks about their future, and what it might hold for them; what they’ll do when the other boys get out of school, and how he’ll make  _ sure  _ that they finish—he feels like a young father sometimes, utterly protective of the three youngest ones and sometimes uncertain if their current lifestyle is really what he wants for them. Himself? Sure. But for them? He doesn’t know, yet.  _

_ Either way he barely gets time to dwell on it. The younger boys are now climbing all over Jackson while Mark watches and laughs, leaving him alone in their bubble of silence with Jinyoung.  _

_ Jinyoung steps into his line of sight, back to the crowd of people and face hidden where Jaebum has leaned up against the goalpost. Jaebum watches his face as Jinyoung reaches out to delicately brush his fingertips across the front of his t-shirt where he has unzipped his gaudy gown.  _

_ “Does it hurt?” Jinyoung murmurs to him, fingers lingering, looking like he wants to touch it for real, but he drops his hand to his side.  _

_ Jaebum looks down at the place where Jinyoung has meant to touch and didn’t. “No. Not so much anymore.”  _

_ “Mm.” Jinyoung hesitates, lingering, but he just looks into Jaebum’s face instead.  _

_ There’s something that unnerves him about the look on his face. It’s some mixture of pain, uncertainty, an uneasiness insurmountable and incapable of being described. It’s in the corners of his eyes, the fold of his mouth where his lips press together and disappear when he wets them with a quick tongue, it’s in the lines between his eyebrows as his handsome face draws up into a look that he’d never forget for as long as he lives. It’s the look of total unhappiness that comes along with the realization that nothing can be done to change it.  _

_ “What’s wrong?” Jaebum asks, and the scar on his shoulder throbs at the phantom fingers pressing into it like a bruise.  _

Much as it always does, the edges of the dream begin to warp: he knows how it’s supposed to end, how the younger boys will interrupt them and the look on Jinyoung’s face will disappear like it was never there. He knows, in his heart, the way that a smile replaces the unhappiness that had formed, and the laugh that bursts from his mouth when he jumps on Yugyeom’s back and catches Jaebum’s eye, grinning back at him. There’s the flash from a camera as someone takes the photo that lurks in Jaebum’s wallet, creases white and corners softened to the texture of towels. 

In his dream, though, the boys behind them have seemed to disappear:

_ “Nothing’s wrong, hyung,” Jinyoung tells him, and the scar on his shoulder begins to burn. Jaebum reaches out to catch his wrist in slow motion but by the time his arm extends Jinyoung is no longer standing in front of him, but behind; the crowds on the field have somehow gone and evaporated into the air like mist.  _

_ The two of them are alone, graduation gowns rippling in an invisible wind. Stadium lights burn shadows onto the astroturf as Jinyoung takes a step forward, the two of them suddenly facing each other, the hollow ringing of a high noon bell as his challenger approaches. Jaebum tries to call to him but, like it always does in dreams, the sound sticks in his throat and nothing but silence comes out.  _

Jinyoung,  _ he wants to say, desperately.  _ Jinyoung. Jinyoung. 

In the waking world, his lips form around the word with no sound. 

_ All of a sudden Jinyoung stops, halfway across the field, somehow both closer and further than he had been before. The miniature suns of the stadium lights flicker once before burning brighter, illuminating the way that Jinyoung’s eyes widen over a silent gasp. On his shirt, suddenly visible where the graduation gown has gone and in the clothes he had been in the very first day he’d seen him after 13 years, a deep red stain begins to bloom. It is red, a poppy not unlike the one that Jaebum had grown, mirrored in the spot where his own had once been.  _

_ “Hyung, what did you do?” he asks, hand coming away from his chest wet and gloved in bright red blood. “What did you do?” _

_ The words are too familiar, too painful. Jaebum wants to run to him, wants to cover the wound with both hands until he’s buried to the wrists in it, but the dream keeps him rooted to the ground to silently scream as Jinyoung hits the grass on his knees, pink sweater dyed red.  _

_ The sky, once black with night above the glow of the stadium lights, brightens with a flash of lightning. The thunder must follow, he tells himself, watching rivulets of blood trail down Jinyoung’s arms and stain in the threads of his sweater. The thunder must follow, and if it does, then I’m not dreaming. _

_ “Hyung, what did you do?” he moans, slumped, hands still pressed to his chest as though he’s expressing some heartfelt emotion and not trying to keep the blood in. “Oh, hyung, what did you do—“  _

_ The hair on his arms raises, static charge in the air as the world vibrates with the force of thunder just before it cracks in the air like an opening stone. It swells and swells, gearing up to roar across the sky like some heavenly engine, and his heart, both sleeping and awake, pounds in the thinness of his chest.  _

It’s not a dream, oh god, it’s not a dream—

_ CRACK! _

Jaebum jerks, gasping, eyes flying open at the sound of a doorknob slamming into a wall. Sweat drips down his neck from the strands of his hair plastered to the skin of it, the blankets kicked away when he sits up and shoves them while his body burns from the remnants of the nightmare. He doubles over and grabs handfuls of slick hair at the back of his head, panting, painfully unaware that the thunder that had cracked at the end of his dream was the sound of Jinyoung pushing his door open hard enough for it to bounce off the wall. 

“Yah! Wake up, asshole, we have to—“

Jaebum hears Jinyoung’s voice and looks up, dazed. Jinyoung blinks back at him in quiet surprise: he’s dressed in form fitting jeans and a plain shirt underneath a long, knitted cardigan. The sight of him with his wavy, parted hair and his mouth open on the words he’d stopped before they left reminds Jaebum painfully that he’d just had a nightmare and nothing more. Jinyoung is alive, in front of him, and calling him an asshole for some reason. 

He looks away and doesn’t acknowledge him. Jaebum blinks the sleep and the dream from his tired eyes, running a slightly shaky hand through the damp length of his inky hair to keep it from the sweat that’s drying on his forehead and jaw. There’s a weird silence that descends over the room, almost as if Jinyoung feels guilty for shouting at him. 

“Hey…” he says, oddly soft, so much so that Jaebum can’t help but cast him a surprised glance that holds when he sees the concern folded into Jinyoung’s slight frown. Jinyoung blinks at him a couple of times as though he’s taking in the sight of him and analyzing it: still in bed, shirtless, sweating, dazed and standoffish. 

Jaebum swallows and Jinyoung doesn’t follow it with his eyes, but instead holds his and clutches the doorknob tighter where he’d caught it on the rebound from the wall. 

“Are you...okay?” 

Surprised, Jaebum turns more toward him. He’s not sure what to say right away, though there’s a plethora of things he could and get away with:  _ fuck off, do you care, get out of my room.  _ But in the aftershocks of dreams and the  _ aliveness  _ of the man standing in the doorway white knuckling the handle, Jaebum just takes a shaky breath and says,

“I think so.” 

“Did you have a nightmare?”

_ There’s one standing in the doorway,  _ he thinks to himself, but just nods as he stands up and turns away. 

“Oh. Was it...scary?”

“Not scary,” he replies, aware that he can feel Jinyoung’s eyes on the expanse of his back now, burning a hot hole through the eyes of the panther tattooed somewhere near the center of his shoulder blades. He’s not even sure why he’s answering: based on the fight they had the night before, he’d be well within his rights to completely ignore him and only speak to him when absolutely necessary. But there’s a lingering sense of some emotion he can’t define as the dream fades but the image of Jinyoung’s pink sweater turned red with blood remains plastered against the backs of his eyes.

“Oh. Bad?”

“Yeah,” he mumbles, digging through his duffel bag he has yet to fully unpack into the drawers of the dresser for an undershirt. Jinyoung had seemed in a hurry when he opened the door, so Jaebum aims to get dressed and he them to where they need to go and shower off the bad dream later in the peacefulness of a dark winter dusk.

There’s a few moments of awkward silence as Jinyoung lingers in the doorway while Jaebum pulls out a neatly folded turtleneck and pulls it on over the shirt. He intends to change into his slacks, but refuses to give Jinyoung any sense of satisfaction of seeing him in his boxers, so he pulls them out and looks at him with an intentional hesitation. 

Jinyoung isn’t looking at him, though; his eyes are aimed on his hand holding the slacks, but they’re unfocused like he’s thinking of something else. He can’t help the way his heart wonders what it is. 

“Jinyoung,” he says, too softly for his own good. 

Jinyoung looks up in surprise as though Jaebum had woken him up. “Huh?”

He holds up the pants in his hand while the other runs through his hair again, finally drying. A few shorter pieces fall across his forehead and the long ones curl in a half circle behind his ear to brush the underside of his jaw. “Can you…?”

“Oh….oh!” he exclaims, face pinking immediately on the apples of his cheeks and the visible tips of his ears. This, too, has yet to change. Jaebum feels an awful squeezing somewhere in his chest at the familiar sight of his embarrassment.

“I’m sorry,” he says, still clutching the doorknob but not closing the door right away. His eyes slant downward, more toward the floor at Jaebum’s feet, before he licks his lips and continues, “you were still asleep when I was getting dressed, which I thought was weird, and I have a magazine interview today—it’s okay, don’t look so stressed, Jae forgot to tell you about it and, uh, so did I,” he says, looking more red, “so I very rudely opened your door and was yelling at you to get up, but you were having a nightmare. So, I’m sorry.” 

It’s a lot of words said all at once in a rush; Jaebum is too taken aback by it to say anything. The flush on Jinyoung’s face starts to creep down the visible skin of his neck.

“And I’m—I’m sorry about everything else, too—“

“Jinyoung,” Jaebum warns, heart starting to thud. The fabric of his pants crumples in his fingers when they tighten into a fist. He can’t allow him this, an admission of guilt. If Jaebum allows him this, what else will he allow him to do, then? What else will Jinyoung manage to twist from him until his bones break? “Don’t.”

“Please. Just—“ he seems so uncertain, now, miles and miles from the arrogant, self-centered man he’d appeared to be when Jaebum had first arrived, concerned only about himself and the pleasure he could wring out of people who stepped within a foot of him. This is more true to the Jinyoung he knew: the one who bit his bottom lip and looked anywhere but at your eyes while he tried to think of a way to apologize without it sounding like another insult. “Just let me say sorry—“

“I don’t want you to say sorry, Jinyoung.”

“Then what do you want?” he asks. It sounds a little desperate which makes Jaebum feel so endlessly confused. 

Instead of telling a truth that could get him killed, like  _ I don’t know anymore  _ or  _ to kill you and get it over with,  _ Jaebum just sighs heavily and says, 

“For you to close the door so I can change my pants and get you to your magazine interview.” 

Amazingly, out of every reaction he could have, Jinyoung  _ laughs.  _ He hadn’t precisely been joking, but there’s a part of him calling from the deepest part of the well that says he can’t exactly be upset that he had made Jinyoung laugh. Especially when the smile crinkles his eyes just like it used to. Jaebum’s mouth twitches in response, almost a smile, but not yet. 

“Why, Sejin-ssi, were you about to smile?” Jinyoung asks with an exaggerated gasp, finally letting go of the doorknob to slap both hands to his chest over his heart. It reminds him a little too much of the dream; it makes his stomach ache a bit and he turns away. 

“No,” he says, bordering on incredulous that, after such an intense and ridiculous fight, that they could be interacting so…gently. Almost friendly. 

Dangerously, dangerously close to friendly.

“Sure. You wanna know what’s funny?” 

“If I let you tell me will you leave so I can finish getting dressed?”

Jinyoung laughs again; the sound of it is the same, the closed mouth version of a  _ hyuck-hyuck  _ noise but in a deeper register than the soprano of his youth. 

“I used to know someone who did the same thing. Try to deny that they were gonna smile.” Jinyoung’s voice sounds almost a little wistful, out of his new character enough that Jaebum looks up from the neatly folded content of his duffel bag. “You actually kinda….”

He trails off. Jaebum just keeps looking at him, dark eyebrow raised, as the smile and laughter sort of fades out of Jinyoung’s expression like the color in an old photograph. His own thick eyebrows dip in the middle as he clears his throat and seems to reassess what he’d been about to say. 

“Anyway. Um, that’s all.” The awkwardness that has dissipated without him noticing has returned, filling up the space that Jinyoung’s laugh has left as the younger man pulls the door closer to his body with an intended exit. As he backs out, Jinyoung says, “I’m sorry. I’ll wait downstairs for you.”

The door closes with a quiet  _ snick, _ leaving Jaebum shut up alone in a silence he isn’t quite sure what to do with anymore. 

  
  


*** 

  
  


Unexpectedly (and decidedly unwelcomingly) things... _ change  _ between them. Jaebum is reluctant to say that things get easier, because to admit that something fundamental had transpired between the two of them that morning Jinyoung had woken him up from a nightmare would be to admit that he had let a piece of himself fall away and  _ allow  _ things to get easier, and this, in turn, would make the job he had come to do that much harder. Despite this, though, it would be naive to say that everything remains the same.

For one thing, Jinyoung’s intentionally antagonistic nature seems to recede, though it doesn’t disappear completely. There are still mornings where the haughty actor pushes his thousand dollar sunglasses up the bridge of his nose with a sneer and quips at him in a way that’s intentionally annoying.  _ Sejin-ssi, you haven’t said a word to me all day, cat got your tongue?  _ But, in spite of this, the malice that it seemed to have carried originally has stripped itself away, and remains mostly playful or, on his own off days, a tad empty. Jaebum finds that he doesn’t mind so much and this in of itself is a fragile, dangerous line to walk.

Secondly, Jinyoung has mostly stopped his thinly veiled attempts at seduction; if Jaebum were to guess, the things he did try in their first few days together were mostly some sort of a power display, as if to say  _ you’re  _ my  _ bodyguard and I possess all the power over you.  _ Whatever it was it didn’t work the way he’d wanted it to, clearly, and in realizing that he has backed down from it. That’s not to say that he doesn’t still do it: it’s a glance, a play on words with a smug look in his direction followed by a closed-mouth laugh when Jaebum either looks away or doesn’t respond, a lingering hand on his arm or shoulder as Jinyoung passes by. Harder still are the times that it isn’t intentional. It’s the shifting of his hips in the car seat, the length of his neck when he turns his head away, the skin of his thighs shades lighter than the rest of him visible in the shorts he wears to sleep. These things are the worst because Jinyoung is not initiating them. Jaebum had loved him once, and the pulpy mess of his heart has sought them out and found itself comforted by a familiarity he had not expected. 

Or wanted. But as much as the head tries to silence it, the heart is hard to quiet. 

Worst of all is the laughter. And even worse than that, as if it could not get any more so, is the way that they tip-toe around some careful camaraderie, and this is the thing that Jaebum had wanted to avoid more than anything else. It would not be considered friendship, as Jaebum is hesitant still to allow him that sort of foothold; he retains his professional distance, communicating with Jinyoung’s manager via text or phone call or, when he’s feeling especially busy getting Jinyoung gigs, over email. He blocks most of Jinyoung’s attempts to draw him out of his room at home, declining his offers of watching a movie ( _ yeah, right, Jinyoungie, we saw how that ended last time) _ or playing cards with a nod and the closing of his bedroom door. Sometimes this is met with a childish annoyance but more often than not it is met with disappointment, and this is what worries him.

Weeks pass of this, a steady routine somehow created in their delicate balance hung between professional and friendly. He can sense it in the way that Jinyoung often talks his ear off in the car, regaling Jaebum with unsolicited stories of cast member faux pas and award show shenanigans and what really takes place backstage at them. Sometimes he’s bombarded with stories about Jinyoung sleeping with directors, producers, casting agents; if Jinyoung ever notices his knuckles whitening on the wheel as he drives him to the set of something or other he never comments on it, and Jaebum listens in a tense silence as he drones on and on and on about it. There’s a feeling like a molten rock turning in his stomach but he doesn’t acknowledge it and will take care of it, guiltily, when he’s alone.

Regardless of how stoically he tries to deny the tentative friendship that begs to bloom between two people with secrets, there is one thing he cannot deny no matter how hard he tries to silence the voice of it in the back of his mind:

Something between them has changed, and changes still. And it’s not good. 

  
  


***

 

After their rocky first couple of days had smoothed into the  _ whatever it is  _ of their first month, Jaebum finally feels content enough to sit on the couch or in the greenroom to be on his phone or read a book. On days like this with no schedule, Jinyoung is often sleeping in or doing something menial like laundry for a few hours before he eventually joins Jaebum in whatever his own menial activity of choice is, though they don’t always partake in the same room. It is a strange dance, a familiarity with each other that Jaebum thinks is not deserved on either behalf. He wonders if it has always been this way with his bodyguards, or if there is a force unseen that has bound them together in a way untouchable and unbreakable by anything. Heavenly or otherwise.

It is on one of these days, a dreary, wet Saturday toward the middle of March when Jinyoung calls “Sejin-ssi!” in a sing-song voice before flouncing down on the couch nearly on top of him. They both jostle with the force of it, Jaebum dropping the book he’d been reading to the cushion beside him as Jinyoung’s knee digs into his thigh and his arm radiates heat on his skin where he’s slung it on the back of the couch inches away from his neck.

“Sejin-ssi,” he says, frustratingly close, but this, too, is something that Jaebum has grown accustomed to. Where he had at first wondered if this was one of Jinyoung’s attempts at seducing him according to the warning he received from both Jonghyun and Hyunwoo, now he’s not so sure. He thinks Jinyoung might just be a tad overly friendly, enjoying the comfort of someone close by way of a lack of personal space. 

It’s distracting. Very much so. 

“What?” 

Jinyoung tilts his head and lays it on his arm, looking at Jaebum sideways. This close he can see the mark where Jinyoung used to have a mole on his jaw: he wants to ask,  _ Jinyoung, why would you get rid of that?  _ and knows he can’t. Instead he just looks back into Jinyoung’s eyes where they’re already on his and waits for Jinyoung to answer him.

He doesn’t, at least not right away. A strange staring contest begins: Jinyoung barely blinks, the focus of his eyes moving from Jaebum’s right to his left. Jaebum just stares back, no stranger to this, face blank as Jinyoung breaks and glances down the slope of his nose to his lips. He spends just a little too long looking at them, though; Jaebum feels a prickle at the back of his neck under his hair and is about to say something when Jinyoung looks back up into his eyes with a smile.

“Can we go somewhere?” 

Jaebum checks his watch: it’s barely 4pm, meaning a lot of places he might want to go won’t be super crowded.

“Sure. Where do you want to go?”

Jinyoung’s smile widens. “This coffee shop down in Myeongdong. Can we take the subway, though?”

With a shake of his head, Jaebum pulls his phone out to send Jinyoung’s manager a text. “No. We’re driving.”

He sighs but he doesn’t sound angry. Jaebum lifts his hips a bit to slide his phone back into the pocket of his black slacks, aware that Jinyoung watches his hand against the fabric but chooses to ignore it. 

“Let me go change––” 

“No,” Jinyoung says, putting a firm hand on Jaebum’s chest when he’s about to stand, and it pins him to the back of the couch. His heartbeat stutters and he’s positive that Jinyoung feels it––he twitches like he’s going to push Jinyoung’s hand away by the wrist when he feels the pads of Jinyoung’s fingertips press a little into the muscle, but he just looks at him instead with an eyebrow raised in question. Jinyoung slides his hand down a little, toward the top of his stomach, feeling the soft fabric of his black turtleneck. “Wear this. It’s nice.” 

Jaebum swallows. He’s about to push Jinyoung’s hand away for real when Jinyoung just pulls it away on his own, tucking it behind his back as he grins at Jaebum and arches to pop his spine. He says something about getting his coat from his room, but he shifts on his thighs at the same time and Jaebum looks down to watch, instantly guilty when he gets caught. 

“Hey,” Jinyoung says, both hands coming to cover the crotch of his jeans in jest, which makes Jaebum look away quickly. This in itself is an admission of guilt and he grits his teeth as Jinyoung laughs all the way to his room and back down the stairs with a long, grey coat in his hand. 

“Eyes up here, huh?” he teases, pointing as he shoulders on his coat across from where Jaebum is doing the same. 

Without dignifying that with a response, Jaebum grabs the key off the hook and leaves Jinyoung laughing to toe on his shoes, alone. 

  
  
  
  


After struggling to find a place to park the car on the rain-soaked streets, the sun decides to come out from behind the mass of grey clouds and reflects in infinitum in the mirror-faces of the puddles. Jaebum slips on his sunglasses where he’s walking behind Jinyoung, busy on his phone and looking up every so often as he guides them through streets and alleyways.

“Are you sure you know where you’re going?” Jaebum asks, in a rare show of initiation. He slides his hands in the pockets of his coat as Jinyoung throws him an annoyed look over his shoulder and keeps walking, carefully avoiding the water gathered in the road. 

“Yes, actually, it’s right here!” he says, and stops so suddenly that Jaebum runs right into the back of him, instinctively grabbing him by the waist to keep them both from stumbling. Jinyoung makes a surprised noise and tenses under his hands; Jaebum grunts when his chest hits Jinyoung’s back and then immediately lets go and steps away to fiddle with his sunglasses when Jinyoung turns around. 

“It’s up there,” he says, eyes hidden behind his own sunglasses, so Jaebum isn’t sure if he’s looking at him or if he knows the tips of his ears are red, but they are, and that makes Jaebum feel even more embarrassed for some reason. He follows the line of Jinyoung’s finger to the glass windows of a fourth floor, but the sun shining against them bounces off and hides whatever they could have seen of the establishment from the road. 

“Lead the way, then,” Jaebum says, pulling open the door and holding it for him before following him inside.

Once in the lobby of the ground floor, they realize they have about maybe three feet of space on either side of them: it’s incredibly cramped, but well lit and clean, just small. There’s a staircase that spirals upward toward the floors with actual businesses, and an elevator against the far wall that looks like it would fit all of one person inside of it, two if they were on top of each other. Jinyoung seems to realize that Jaebum is looking at it with a faint look of disdain.

“Wanna take the elevator, Sejin-ssi?” he asks, accompanied by a soft elbow in Jaebum’s ribs. Without smiling, Jaebum pushes his elbow forward and away, though not ungently. 

“Shut up and take the stairs.” 

Jinyoung’s laugh echoes in the metallic stairway, but he doesn’t argue as he starts to climb with loud, reverberating steps. His sunglasses are pushed up into his hair, pushing it back from his face in a way that does something weird to Jaebum’s insides that he furiously ignores as he follows closely behind him up to the fourth floor. 

When they arrive, the landing is just barely big enough for both of them to stand on: to the right of them is a little more room, but more than half of that is taken up by a bookcase with a couple of pairs of shoes on it. Jinyoung half-bends in front of him to remove his shoes; alarmed by their proximity, Jaebum takes a step back onto the top stair and waits for Jinyoung’s instructions. 

“C’mon, Sejin-ssi,” he says, pointing to the bookshelf with the hand holding both of his leather shoes hooked in his fingers, “you have to take your shoes off and grab some of the slippers.”

“Um…why?” 

Jinyoung looks over his shoulder and smiles at him. “You can’t wear your shoes in here. The cats might get sick.”

Jaebum blanches. “The cats––?”

The glass door in front of them opens, a little bell on the top of it jingling to cut off the rest of his sentence, had he had anything to end it with. A tall, handsome guy probably in his early twenties sticks his head out of the door and smiles brightly at Jinyoung before waving them both in. 

“Mr. Park! We’ve been waiting for you. Come on in!” 

Upon Jinyoung’s hurried encouragement, Jaebum slips off his own leather shoes in a daze and accepts the pink, squishy slippers that Jinyoung passes back to him. He’s pulled in through the glass door decorated in frosted appliqués of cats that he’s somehow missed, the employee who’d let them in pulling it tightly closed behind them. 

“Welcome to Cafe Cafe!” he says, though this is largely directed at Jinyoung and not him. This is also something he’s grown accustomed to: being Jinyoung’s shadow, in a way, seen but not heard; mostly everywhere they go people address Jinyoung and not him at all even for a greeting. It seems to be universally understood that he’s Jinyoung’s bodyguard and that his presence largely doesn’t matter except in a dire situation. Which, if he’s honest, he’s okay with. Most of the fat cat bureaucrats that Jinyoung has to deal with in his chosen industry have nothing of substance to offer him except mental target practice, so he’s alright with being ignored.

Out of the corner of his eye, he seems the employee move suspiciously close to Jinyoung a little too fast for his liking. Jaebum steps forward, quickly blocking most of Jinyoung’s body with his right side and gripping the barista’s wrist to bar him from coming any closer.

“What are you doing?” Jaebum asks, voice hard, and the boy’s eyes widen. His fingers are wrapped around the neck of a bottle marked  _ hand sanitizer _ . Jaebum clears his throat and lets go when Jinyoung makes a noise and digs his fingers hard into his ribs. 

“Yah,” he complains, throwing him a sideways glance as he takes the hand sanitizer and rubs it in before handing it to him, which he takes dutifully even though he’s not really sure why. “Be nice, would you?”

“My job is to protect you,” Jaebum says, monotone, but definitely a little embarrassed. The employees have seemed to already forget that he’d even moved or spoken, more enthralled with the famous Park Jinyoung being in their cute little cat cafe on a dreary Saturday afternoon.

“Relax, Mega Man,” Jinyoung says playfully, politely dismissing the employee and half turning to Jaebum where they’re still standing in the entryway. “Do you want a coffee?” 

“Sure,” he mumbles, more so out of lack of anything else to say. Jinyoung bumps their elbows together and leaves him there to go order drinks at the counter to the right while Jaebum looks around dumbly from the door.

The brightness of the place is dimmed a little where he keeps his sunglasses on, but he can still tell that all the walls of the little square cafe are painted an excruciatingly bright yellow. Rainbow paw prints are everywhere in little lines, mimicking the way cats seem to leave prints on everything. They go up over the tables and are painted on the chairs; the cat towers built into the floor and ceiling like columns in the center of the room and in the corners have them going up in spiral patterns where they then go across the ceiling. All assortments of toys are littered on the floor, feathers and bells and little balls and the toys attached to the poles with stuffed fish dangling from the ends of a string. He glances over to where Jinyoung is ordering drinks for them at a wooden bar, his slim body leaned against it to look at the chalkboard menus while his right hand absently pets a cat sleeping peacefully atop the register.

And it suddenly hits him: cats. There are cats everywhere, sleeping on the floor or the different levels of the cat towers or on the tables. Some are hiding in little cubbies built into the floor or at different heights along the walls, comma-shaped tails hanging sleepily out of the holes. Gorgeous cats of all shapes and sizes slink sneakily along the baseboards or along the trails connecting the cat towers above his head. There’s a distinct aroma of ammonia mixed with strong coffee and sugar that makes his chest feel funny in a way he can’t really describe because he isn’t sure what kind of feeling it really is. 

In any case, Jinyoung seems to have cleared the place out for them so they wouldn’t be disturbed. Jaebum tries not to think about that too much and finds a place to sit on a bench seat across from the bar, watching from behind the sunglasses he refuses to take off as Jinyoung leans on his elbow and adoringly pets the sleeping cat beneath his hand. All of the baristas, male and female, are watching him, too, whispering and giggling behind their hand that Korea’s sweetheart actor Park Jinyoung has decided to grace them all with his radiant presence dimmed only slightly by the black shadow of an unsmiling bodyguard. 

“Why are we here?” Jaebum asks suddenly, surprising Jinyoung when he approaches with their drinks and holds Jaebum’s out to him. He takes it, more to give his hands something to do as he crosses one leg over the other knee and folds his arms in his lap.

“Drinking coffee and petting cats,” Jinyoung says mildly, though there’s a pink flush starting at the tops of his cheeks that tells Jaebum he might be feeling a little put off by the tone of the question. Jaebum doesn’t apologize, though.

“But why here, specifically? There’s a coffee shop down the street from your house that we could have walked to, if you wanted. Do you even like cats?” 

Jinyoung nods, not looking at him, attention focused on the straw sticking out from his iced Americano and snapping his fingers to hopefully gain some feline attention other than Jaebum’s. “I like cats just fine. I wanted to have a nice, relaxing day at a coffee shop, so here we are.”

This answer sounds mostly sincere, but he still doesn’t believe it. He grew up with Jinyoung and, despite being apart from him for the last 13 years and missing a lot of the ways that he grew up, there’s still something very inherent about the way that he lies. Jaebum decides not to comment on this, though, choosing instead to lapse into silence as he sips his coffee and stares at a cat infographic attached to the front of the bar. He tries to read the names of the cats instead of looking at the way that Jinyoung is looking at him, but the writing is too small.

Soft k-pop and American pop music plays over the speakers to fill the silence between them, Jaebum silently sipping his coffee and ignoring the way Jinyoung is looking at him where he sat down in a chair at the table to Jaebum’s right. He allows a couple of songs to pass by and a few cats to brush up against his heel before Jinyoung finally breaks and sets his coffee down with a sigh. 

“Fine. I came here for you.”

Startled, Jaebum turns his head and looks at him from behind his sunglasses. “For  _ me?  _ I didn’t want to come here. When have I ever said I wanted to come to a cat cafe?” 

“You said you liked cats,” he says a little defensively, and Jaebum is a little confused at where that’s coming from but doesn’t latch onto it. 

“I do like cats. But I didn’t say I wanted to come to a cafe––”

“No,” Jinyoung interrupts, but not unkindly. He sounds a little... _ shy,  _ actually, if Jaebum isn’t mistaken, and that makes his stomach hurt in a way he doesn’t really want to think about. “But you said that you liked them and never got to own one. So I thought we’d come here to hang out for a little bit.” 

Jaebum grips his coffee by the lid and crosses his arms again, elbow on his thigh and holding his coffee near his hip. He raises an eyebrow. “So, what, that automatically made you assume I wanted to come to a cat cafe?” 

“No,” he says again. Jinyoung looks down at where a fat, gray-blue tabby has started to wind between Jinyoung’s ankles and meow quietly for attention. “It’s––I did it  _ for _ you. Like, as a peace offering.”

“A peace offering? For what?” 

“All the bullshit I pulled the first couple days,” he says mildly, putting his coffee on the table and leaning down to pick up the cat with both hands. Jaebum’s heart squeezes uncomfortably hard at the look on Jinyoung’s face, though he can only see some of it where he keeps his gaze lowered to the cat in his lap. “I had...a hard life growing up.”

Jaebum’s stomach clenches.

_ Oh, don’t I know.  _

“And it’s not an excuse for the way I am, but it explains it a little. I don’t know,” he says, sounding exasperated, but mostly with himself. “I’m not going to try and explain it. It’s just a peace offering, okay? Like, you’re my bodyguard and I want us to get along. I’m sorry I acted like an asshole when you first got here, and I’m sorry I tried to fuck you.” 

Hearing the words  _ I’m sorry I tried to fuck you  _ does another weird thing to his stomach, but he’s been ignoring that, too. 

“I know you’re really serious, and I know your job is your life, or whatever. But we can try to get along, right? You don’t have to be my friend, if you don’t want to be. I get it. But we can at least try and get along, right?” 

He sounds so... _ sad.  _ It hurts, in a way that it shouldn’t, to hear the slightest tinge of desperation in his voice when he asks the last question. Has he really been friendless all these years? Did he really never meet another person to connect with that could fill the space that the absence of the other six had made? And on the heels of that comes an unwelcome thought, one that makes his fingers tighten on the plastic lid of his iced coffee: did Jinyoung try so hard to sleep with him because sex was the one thing he found to fill the void he’d dug inside himself when he left? 

God, this is so fucked up. All of it feels so turned on its head and for the first time, he’s afraid. 

“Sejin-ssi…”

He’s not sure what to say. He’s scared to open his mouth and say something that he shouldn’t, something that might give it away, something that could get them both killed, something from the inner reaches of his heart that he wanted to keep buried forever. The words stick in his throat and he swallows, with difficulty, and his heart pounds when Jinyoung notices it. The plastic of his coffee lid creaks a little under the pressure of his tightening fingers.

“Jinyoung…”

“Ah!” Before he can finish, or Jinyoung can say anything else, the other man laughs in surprise when a small kitten appears out of nowhere and leaps onto the top of Jaebum’s foot where it’s shoved into the squishy pink sandal. The tiny mocha colored thing nearly falls, claws out, poking tiny holes in the material, dragging itself back up until it can sink them into the cloth of his sock and into his ankle. Jaebum grits his teeth and pushes his lips together but doesn’t move as the blue-eyed kitten bats at the edge of his slacks before curling up into a ball and resting its tiny head on his ankle. 

“Oh, my god,” Jinyoung says, grinning madly. “Sejin-ssi, this kitten is going to sleep on your ankle.” 

He won’t look down at it. He can’t. He can already feel the weight of the kitten’s warm little body on the top of his foot, one soft, dark brown ear poking up into the leg of his pants to brush against where his black sock ends. Jinyoung laughs again, open mouth this time, pulling his phone out of his coat pocket and angling it above Jaebum’s foot to get multiple pictures at multiple angles of the baby cat fast asleep on the top of his foot. Jaebum is already positive that it’s one of the cutest things he’s ever seen in his life, and he’s honestly afraid of the reaction that will pass across his features if he even glances down, just once.

“You’re really not going to look at her?” Jinyoung asks, laughing, phone up to take a picture of Jaebum sitting stoically with a kitten resting on his foot.

“No,” he says, but can feel the way his face wants to crack with a smile, and tries very hard not to let it.

“Sejin-ssi, you have to. It’s so cute. Oh, my god it’s so cute. You’re so cute.” 

Something about hearing Jinyoung say  _ you’re so cute  _ makes his stomach roll; Jinyoung seems to realize what he said when Jaebum’s head turns in his direction and his cheeks and ears start to burn a pretty shade of bright red. 

“Sorry.” 

“It’s…” Jaebum trails off, sneaking a look down at the little Siamese kitten currently napping peacefully on the top of his socked foot, and breaks into a small smile when he can’t hold it back any longer. “It’s alright.”

“Look at that!” he exclaims, and gets a small laugh out of Jaebum when he takes another picture. “Oh, there’s one next to you, too!” 

And one by his shoulder, as well: suddenly there’s another two cats converging on him, one white with two different colored eyes and one black, slinking sneakily toward his lap where it can blend in with his clothes. Jaebum cracks another smile as the white one rests its paws on his shoulder, bumping its head against the side of his and purring loudly into his ear like a little steam engine.

“Wow,” Jinyoung says, looking fond in a way that he shouldn’t. “Cats love you.” 

He laughs and finally moves his free hand up to scritch the head of the white cat perched on his shoulder. “Seems like it.” Jaebum glances in his direction and, though he’s still wearing his sunglasses inside, Jinyoung seems to know that he’s looking at him and they both share a small, but genuine, smile.

They hang around in the cafe for a little while longer, the kitten finally abandoning her post on Jaebum’s foot, giving him the opportunity to stand up and stretch as Jinyoung takes their coffee cups to the counter to dispose of them. He watches Jinyoung’s shoulders when he laughs, looking away and at his watch when the male barista asks him for a photo and leans in with his phone. Somehow four hours had passed and though the sun has gone down, the street below them is awash with neons and day-light bright light boxes. 

As Jinyoung and Jaebum are taking off the slippers and sanitizing their hands before they leave, the small, female barista shyly comes up to Jaebum and taps him on the shoulder.

“Just so you know, they just finished washing and waxing the staircase, so you should take the elevator. They get really slippery when they do that and we’ve had people fall.” 

Jaebum’s stomach drops, but he just nods and thanks her in a quiet voice. Jinyoung leads them out into the cold stairwell and watches him as he slips back into his shoes and guides Jinyoung toward the tiny, technically two person elevator and calls it with the small button on the wall. 

“Let me go first,” Jaebum says, looking at the metal doors and not at Jinyoung, who turns his head to glance at him questioningly. “I’ll wait at the bottom for you.”

“Can’t we just go together?” he asks, shifting on his feet at the elevator dings and the doors slide open in front of them. “It’ll be fine.”

“That elevator is so small, though,” he says, trying to justify the reason he doesn’t want to go down with him: not because the elevator is small and it’s potentially dangerous, but because the elevator is small and he doesn’t know that he can be that close to him without losing his mind. 

“Hush,” Jinyoung says playfully, turning to step in backward and yanking him forward by the shirt.

Jaebum grunts; he has to maneuver quickly not to step on Jinyoung’s foot when the younger man jerks him forward into the elevator and against him so the doors have room to close. Jinyoung’s grip tightens in the hem of his turtleneck when Jaebum’s elbow hits the metal wall behind Jinyoung’s head, chests and stomachs and thighs bumping as the elevator dings to signal their descent.

It would have been fine if Jinyoung didn’t make a noise in the back of his throat when their bodies connect, but he does, and Jaebum’s hand turns to a fist on the freezing steel of the elevator wall as he pushes himself back. Even still there’s barely any room to stand: they’re barely two inches apart, Jinyoung’s eyes wide in the dimmed, yellowed light coming from above and his lips shining when he flicks his tongue across them. Jaebum can’t help but watch and he knows Jinyoung knows he’s watching, the fingers gripping his shirt pulling the material tighter when he makes a fist. 

Desire, hot and wrong and sharp as a razor blade, slices down his back when Jinyoung’s breath passes across his lips on an exhaled breath that sounds suspiciously like  _ Sejin hyung.  _ They pass the third floor, and then the second, the time ticking down fast between them as their bodies generate heat as they close the gap between their chests just for the few moments they’re suspended between floors. Jaebum swallows and looks at his mouth, an ache in his stomach that matches the one in his heart, sick with whatever feeling this is when he looks back up into Jinyoung’s eyes and sees it mirrored there and darkened with something deeper and sadder. The younger tips his head back, lips slightly parted, and Jaebum feels the backward urge to slide his hand down from the wall into his hair and to his neck––

_ Ding! _

The elevator hits the ground floor and slides its doors open, letting in a draft of cold air from the front door as it closes around someone’s exit from the shop. The shock of it makes Jaebum gasp, breaking the spell the low light and Jinyoung’s lips had put him under; he pushes back hard off the wall and nearly trips when he stumbles backward out of the elevator. He catches himself on the railing and straightens as Jinyoung stalks out of the elevator and out the front doors of the building without him.

When he catches up, he walks a little bit behind him, and they’ve now lapsed into a silence more reminiscent of Jaebum’s first few days with him. Jinyoung’s shoulders are taut and tense where they’re nearly pulled up to his ears, hands balled to fists in the pockets of his coat as he weaves them through the streets back to the car. The silence stretches on, both of them feeling stiff and awkward when they finally get in and head home. 

Right when they’re about to turn onto Jinyoung’s street, the younger man breaks the silence, though he doesn’t turn from where he’s been looking out the window at the changing lights passing by the window.

“Sejin-ssi.”

“What?”

“Were you going to kiss me in the elevator?” 

He’s not sure. Jaebum’s knuckles whiten when he grips the steering wheel as hard as he can and tries to breathe quietly through his nose. Every nerve ending is alight with the danger of the feeling quickly rising up his throat. He shouldn’t. He knows that he shouldn’t. It should ever have gotten to this point; he was stupid to ever think that it could be this easy, that they could talk to each other like something akin to friends, and now he has dug a grave that he might have to fill with his own body.

“No.”

Jinyoung makes a strangled noise but just says, “did you want to?” 

_ God, more than you know.  _

There’s a beat of silence, the length of a lie.

“No.”

“Okay.”

When Jaebum parks the car, Jinyoung has already thrown himself out of it and stormed inside, leaving him out in the cold to sort through emotions he no longer understands.

 


	9. 8

 

Emotions are fickle and fragile, this Jaebum knows for a fact, and even more so are the ones that were buried when they weren’t ready and meant to stay that way. 

Lying alone on his bed in Jinyoung’s house an entire week after their strange encounter in a tiny elevator at the cat cafe, he chews his lip and wonders how much longer he can do this. It bruises him deep in the heart of his pride: he had preached to the rest of them for over a decade that sentimentality will get you killed. He spent all the years of Jinyoung’s absence building a wall around his heart and coating it in ice, creating this exterior, trying to be someone cold blooded and unforgiving. Jaebum has spent so much precious time cultivating the qualities he thought he needed to be unshakable, only the have the foundations of himself in ruins by the mere whisper of Jinyoung’s breath across his mouth.  

Jaebum throws an arm across his eyes and squeezes them shut. Book forgotten in his lap, he holds in a sigh and tries to think of something else, of  _ anything  _ else, except the way that Jinyoung has broken every expectation he ever held. It’s hard to be in that situation, he thinks, having his beliefs challenged, his whole world turned upside down, and every emotion he’d never give himself the chance to feel all lit up and burning like an oil drum. 

Jinyoung hasn’t spoken to him in a week. It feels unfair, almost. What does he have to be mad about? He had said himself that he was sorry for trying to sleep with him, that they didn't have to be friends, just that he wanted them to get along. And yet when he’d asked Jaebum-not-Jaebum in the car if he had  _ wanted  _ to kiss him and Jaebum-not-Jaebum had lied, he was angry. Hurt. As though he’d been expecting a different answer and got the one he didn’t want. Jinyoung had left Jaebum outside that night, slamming into his room and not coming out until the next morning when Jaebum was waiting downstairs for him to take him to set. There had been a thick, unnervingly awkward tension that didn’t exist before as Jinyoung looked straight past him and walked out the front door. 

If Jaebum said the radio silence didn’t make him uncomfortable, he’d be a liar.

He’s in the middle of wishing that Jinyoung would have acted like this to begin with, ignoring him and blowing him off and hooking up with his old bodyguard somewhere else so that this situation never happened when his private phone starts ringing in his dresser. With a sigh he pulls it out and checks the caller ID before answering it and holding it to his ear with a shoulder. 

“Hello?” 

“Hello, Jaebum,” Jonghyun says, low voice smooth on the other line. Jaebum tries not to sigh—this is the last thing he wants to be dealing with right now.

“Hello, hyung.”

“Are you somewhere where you can talk?” 

Jinyoung is in the kitchen, Jaebum knows, because despite it being on the other side of the house, he can hear him banging around and singing. Beautifully, too, which just makes Jaebum feel that much more unsettled. He hadn’t been able to do that when they were younger. 

“Yes, I am. Only briefly. He’s in the kitchen for now, so make it quick.”

“Yah, don’t tell me what to do, asshole,” Jonghyun says playfully, but Jaebum doesn’t smile and so he’s glad that Jonghyun can’t see him. “Anyway, it’ll be quick. Just wanna check up on how it’s going. Any idea of when you’ll complete the mission?”

His stomach twists itself into knots. In the time he’s been with Jinyoung acting as his bodyguard and being with him nearly 24/7, and all the things that have happened between them and now, it’s almost a little too easy for him to forget that he actually came here to do this job under the guise of another. He feels stupid for ever thinking differently. He’s here to kill Jinyoung and he will have to do it eventually or face risking the lives of everyone involved.  _ And  _ the other five of them kicking around at home like nothing is wrong. It makes his heart brick up uncomfortably in his already uncomfortable chest.

“It’s fine,” he lies, adjusting to lay his head on his arm. “His manager is a little scatter brained. The driving isn’t hard and neither is the guarding since he doesn’t do much besides attend his schedules which are already crawling with security. He can be a little difficult to get along with though.”

Jonghyun laughs and Jaebum can imagine him tipped back in his chair with his feet on the desk, nonchalantly discussing the livelihood of someone who is scheduled to die.

“Tried to seduce you yet?”

He bites his lip, trying not to think about how Jinyoung has tried and nkt tried and still almost succeeded. 

“Not really,” he lies again, too easily.

“Not really or no?” 

Jaebum bristles at the playful challenge. “Not really. He’s...made some remarks and some passes but nothing serious. I think he’s still hung up on his last bodyguard.”

At least this hasn’t changed: he still finds it so easy to lie about certain things. 

“Ahh,” Jonghyun hums. There’s a pause where there’s a brief scribbling of a pen on paper and a muffled request before his voice returns to a normal volume. “I doubt that. Guy likes to sleep around. Probably doesn’t get attached much, you know?”

“Sure,” Jaebum says, because he doesn’t know. 

“Anyway. Any idea of when you’ll complete it?”

“I’m not sure. Hopefully soon,” he says, eyes glancing at the door when he hears the water stop in the kitchen and Jinyoung’s singing stop abruptly. There’s a loud pop followed by a hissing that makes him raise an eyebrow and lift his head despite not being able to see through the door. “I have to make sure all my bases are covered. It’d look a little suspicious if I did it right now and tried to act like I was upset or something.”

“That’s true. Well,” Jonghyun says, sighing in relief, “I trust you and your judgement. You’ll get it done when the time is right. And,” he says, quieter, like he’s speaking coyly from the corner of his mouth, “you’ll have 6 billion dollar blood on your hands. Pretty cool, huh?” 

“I don’t really think that’s appropria—“

Suddenly he is interrupted by a loud, continuous alarm beeping from downstairs; Jaebum’s mouth hangs open on the remainder of his sentence as it dawns on him that it’s the smoke detector. Jonghyun’s tinny voice in his ear asks him  _ what the hell is happening  _ at the same time he hears Jinyoung yell a startled “oh, shit!”, but before Jaebum has the chance to even guess, Jinyoung is bursting into his room with his hair a mess and a frantic look on his face. 

“Sejin, I need your help,” he says, eyes wide and breathless in his anxiety, The sleeves of his sweater are scrunched at his elbows and there’s angry red spots on his skin like he’d been splashed by oil. “I—I kind of set something on fire—“

Jonghyun must have heard this because he says: “Oh, my god, he doesn’t even need hired assassins, bro, he could just get himself killed—“

“Shut up,” Jaebum snaps, heart beating anxiously both from that Jinyoung may have heard it and from that Jinyoung potentially put himself in danger and is scared enough to call him Sejin without any attached formalities. Jaebum pulls the phone away from his face, growls, “I’ll call you later” into the receiver before hanging up and throwing it down. 

Jinyoung waits for him where he’d pushed the door open, smelling vaguely like oil and burned food, their bare arms brushing as Jaebum passes where Jinyoung has pushed up the sleeves of his sweater as they slip down. Jaebum ignores the gritty spark and just follows him into the kitchen, where a pan sits on the glistening chrome of Jinyoung’s futuristic oven top burning and billowing black smoke into the room. The smoke alarm keeps blaring and the acrid black of it burns his eyes, making them water as he coughs a little and fans it away from him. He pushes Jinyoung from the kitchen by the shoulder and barks at him to disarm it. Jaebum quickly unbuttons and pushes his own sleeves to his elbows as he rushes deeper into the kitchen to find any kind of lid without a hole in it; he’s attempting to get rid of the oxygen feeding into the flames but they’re leaping a little higher than he’s comfortable with. The alarm cuts off with an electronic sounding  _ BLAT  _ followed by Jinyoung’s grunt of effort as Jaebum blinks the prickling tears from his eyes. There’s no lid to fit his needs that he can see and the fire is very quickly licking it’s way up toward the ventilator, so as Jinyoung stands at the edge of the counter and anxiously bites a nail, Jaebum just decides to neutralize it. 

He turns, his hair and forehead a little sweaty from standing so close to the burning pan. Jinyoung’s eyes widen and he straightens, looking more nervous than he had, as though he finally realizes this could be a little more serious than a bodyguard trying to help him put out a fire. 

“Where’s the baking soda?” Jaebum asks impatiently twirling his hand when Jinyoung doesn’t answer right away. There’s a sort of blank look on his face before he realizes Jaebum is frantically asking a question and more frantically demanding an immediate answer. 

He points quickly at a cabinet close to the flames, which are now starting to lick at the corners of the square venting above it. Jaebum quickly grabs the large can with one hand and forces it open to upturn it over the fire. Splashback makes sizzling oil and grease come flying at him, so he half turns his head and covers his face partially with his arm until the flames die down to a fizzle and a final, bubbling hiss. The last curls of the smoke come out of the pan and make his eyes water some more until Jaebum throws the empty can down to the counter and forces open the tiny kitchen window over the sink through the blurry film of tears. 

The kitchen seems oddly quiet after the whole ordeal: Jinyoung keeps watching Jaebum as he inspects what happened: ingredients on the island, cut up and ready to get cooked, oil, a half empty glass of wine—

“That is why you don’t drink and cook,” Jaebum says quietly, aware that this is the most they’ve spoken in almost a week in a half. 

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. Jinyoung nods at Jaebum’s advice and chews his lip like he’s embarrassed, cheeks flushed deep red, watching uselessly as Jaebum starts to clean up. “Usually one of the cooks comes over to do this, you know—“

“Then why not have them come work on this one?” Jaebum asks, impatiently but not unkindly. He runs one of his hands through the damp strands around his face to push them backward off his sweaty forehead as he turns the burner off and moves the silenced pan into one of the two large, deep sinks to cool down more. 

“Just wanted it to be special,” Jinyoung mutters, but doesn’t explain why. Jaebum would be a liar if he said he wasn’t a little curious, but he just gets the paper towels off the island and starts cleaning up the leftover baking soda on the counter and oven top. 

It’s quiet for a long time. Jaebum focuses on cleaning up the mess he’d made throwing a whole box of baking soda into a pan while also trying  _ not  _ to focus on the way that Jinyoung is focusing on  _ him.  _ There’s the steady buildup of an obvious tension waiting to be punctured by a needle point and his shoulders tense in anticipation.

“So…” Jinyoung says too casually, the evidence of a nervous warble almost visible, watching Jaebum start scrubbing out the pan wrist deep in soapy sink water. “Who were you on the phone with?”

“When?”

He says it like he’s just making conversation, but Jaebum can hear the thick timbre in his voice. “Just now. When I came into your room.”

“Oh,” Jaebum says apathetically. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Is it your boyfriend?”

“I told you he wasn’t my boyfriend.”

“Yeah, you said  _ that _ other guy wasn’t, but your voice was different was talking to this person. Is he your boyfriend?”

Exasperated, mostly from a combination of fire-related stress and the total stupidity of this conversation after getting ignored for a week, Jaebum leans up from where he’d been loading the pot into the dishwasher and forcefully slaps a hand down on the counter. Damp pieces of his hair curl on his face but he doesn’t push them away. Jinyoung’s gaze meets him head on and the stoicism of it makes him feel a little nervous: out of everyone and everything he’s ever killed there had maybe been a wild card or two. But this is different for him, a territory totally new and unnavigable. Jinyoung  _ is  _ the wild card. Jaebum’s body aches. 

“Does it matter? Why are you asking?”

Jinyoung shrugs, face totally impassive in a way that frightens him a little. Where as Jinyoung had been an unsteady, chirping drunk when they were just street kids with too much time on their hands, it seems that alcohol now just amps up the unpredictable nature of him. 

“Just trying to get to know my bodyguard.”

Kicking the dishwasher door up and shut a little more roughly than necessary Jaebum utters a bitter little laugh. “Right. If it was, would that even stop you?”

“Probably not,” Jinyoung says honestly and with a coy smile pulling at his lips. It’s the first time he’s looked actually present since he’d first burst into Jaebum’s room. 

“Then why bother ask?”

“Because maybe I’m jealous,” he says flatly, and Jaebum stops to stare.

Jinyoung fidgets in place and the nervousness that returns to replace the chicness is genuine. Jaebum finally notices that it’s not just his cheeks that are flushed, but all the way down is neck and up to the tips of his ears are a deep shade of red. The half empty bottle of wine had been just for him, it seems. Jaebum wants to sigh but keeps it in. 

_ No wonder he’s acting so weird and saying all this like it’s out of turn. He’s _ drunk.

“Maybe…” Jinyoung starts to say, then pauses. He chews his lip and glances at Jaebum-not-Jaebum before looking at the soot along his backsplash tile. “I’m jealous. That you have other people in your life besides me. I know that’s not fair, but…” he hesitates once more before dipping his eyebrows down in resolve. 

Jinyoung plants his hands on his hips. “Why did you lie?”

Jaebum’s heart sinks into his stomach: the look on Jinyoung’s face is a paradox mix of readable and yet unreadable: he’s angry at Jaebum for lying about something, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of angry he’d be if he knew who he was. Jaebum’s face remains a stone mask as he swallows and finishes wiping down the counter. 

He hopes his voice doesn’t give him away when he asks, “about what?”

“Wanting to kiss me. Why would you lie about something so stupid?”

Jaebum clenches his teeth and looks down at the tops of his tanned, scarred hands and the simple rings he has on some fingers, and thinks about the feeling that had grown in the pit of his stomach when he was so close to Jinyoung in that elevator. Hidden from the world, their roles, how much more hidden his true identity had been even then, and how afraid he’d been just now that he would find out. 

How badly he wanted to kiss him then and how vehemently he must lie and break his heart now. 

“It wasn’t a lie. I’m sorry if you thought otherwise.”

“See,” Jinyoung says hotly. Jaebum looks up to meet his eyes with a blank expression even though his heart is going crazy in his chest. “This is what I mean. What’s the point of lying? I was there too, Sejin. I could feel the tension between us. The way you tilted your head and pressed closer. I hadn’t even been trying to seduce you then, that was something that happened on its own. So why lie? Huh?” 

“I already told you, it wasn’t a lie,” Jaebum says stiffly. He avoids looking at Jinyoung’s face, a feeling in his chest telling him he would hate to see the expression on it. He busies himself cleaning the counter a little more and checking his watch.

“Yes it is. It’s a lie. I can tell it’s a lie by how you’re avoiding my eyes right now,” he challenges, stepping closer but having to grab the edge of the counter for support. Jaebum grits his teeth and wipes the counter a little more furiously as Jinyoung continues, “I just want to hear you say it—“

“Well I won’t,” Jaebum snaps, interrupting him and throwing the towel harshly to the marbled countertop. “I won’t. What do you want me to say? ‘Yes, Jinyoung, you’re right, all I’ve wanted since I’ve been here is to kiss you, get you into bed, have sex with you’. Why can’t you just accept that I don’t? You even said that you understood if I didn’t want to be friends, that as long as we got along—“

“But we aren’t!” Jinyoung shouts at him, his own hair coming undone from the perfect coif and falling across his forehead a little. “We aren’t getting along and I hate it!” 

“Then hire another bodyguard,” he says, voice icy as he pushes the towel away and starts to leave the room. 

“Sejin, wait—“ 

Before either of them can react, there’s a low, resonating chiming that rings softly through the house. Jaebum pauses but Jinyoung seems to know exactly what it means; he turns away quickly from where Jaebum had almost passed the island in the center of the kitchen and goes to the intercom on the front door. Jaebum grips the edge of the counter and watches as Jinyoung unsteadily runs a hand through his hair and leans on the call button. 

“Yes?” 

“Jinyoungah,” the guard outside says into the speaker, voice crackling through it. “There’s a guy here says you called him over.” 

Jaebum, who had been about to leave to go back in his room, freezes. 

“Oh, yeah. Did you check his ID?”

“Yup.”

Jinyoung leans on his other elbow against the wall underneath the chrome panel. “Does it say Kang Younghyun on it?”

“Yup. That your guy?”

Jinyoung snorts drunkenly and the hair on the back of Jaebum’s neck prickles for whatever reason. 

“Yeah. He’s my guy. Let him in, please.” 

He leans off the intercom at the same time there’s a loud creaking as the front gate opens just enough to let a person slip in and closes again. Jinyoung turns to look over his shoulder at where Jaebum is still standing stonily by the island with a look on his face that Jaebum can’t quite read and then opens the door to a handsome, tall man on the doorstep with his hands shoved in the pockets of a leather jacket. Blonde hair slightly wavy at the ends and parted down the middle frames a face that changes from impassive to genuine when his eyes fold into a smile.

“Hi, Jinyoung.”

“Hi, hyung,” Jinyoung says, and even though Jaebum isn’t looking at him, he can hear the smile in his drink-thick voice. The guy, Younghyun, laughs a little when Jinyoung stumbles a bit and grabs his upper arm gently. 

“Started without me, huh?” 

Jinyoung laughs and grabs the front of his shirt. Younghyun seems surprised but lets Jinyoung pull him closer, putting a hand on his hip when their chests connect. Jaebum wants to look away, a sharp feeling in his stomach like the way a knife point feels, but he stays rooted to the spot as Jinyoung tips his head back much in the same way he’d done for Jaebum just days ago. He watches with a feeling in his gut akin to sharpening blades as their lips meet, soft and brief, before Younghyun leans back. 

“I tried to make you tteokbokki but I burned it and set the kitchen on fire,” Jinyoung pouts. Younghyun laughs at this and turns, going to lead Jinyoung into the house when he sees Jaebum standing in the kitchen and startles. 

“Oh,” he says, surprised. He offers Jaebum a quick greeting and a polite bow which Jaebum doesn’t return. “I’m Jinyoung’s friend, Younghyun.”

Jaebum’s whole body feels like it has been cast in concrete. His teeth grind together as Jinyoung casts barely an uninterested glance in his direction and puts a hand on Younghyun’s chest to guide him away from the kitchen.

“Don’t worry about him,” he says, a snide dismissal. “That’s just my bodyguard.”

“What happened to the other one?” 

Jinyoung sighs wistfully, and loud. Jaebum thinks it may be a little faked since Younghyun also smirks with just the corners of his lips. Jinyoung steps away toward Jaebum but instead reaches for the half empty

bottle of wine on the counter and grabs another full one from the honeycomb wine rack just behind it. 

“He took another job in America,” he says, glancing at Jaebum again before he turns. 

He wishes he had something to say, since standing there like a quiet stone makes him somehow feel guiltier, as though he is allowing the deep, pulsing anger in his stomach to name itself jealousy.  _ Jealousy.  _ God, he’s jealous, isn’t he? The feeling comes at every glance exchanged between Jinyoung and the handsome blonde man dressed all in tight black like a movie bad boy. He does little to stop it, the blatant stab of jealousy, and couldn’t stop it if he tried: this is the truth of it, just like all the others. And so he must accept it for what it is and hopefully bury it alongside the ones that came before it. 

“Don’t worry, Sejin-ssi,” Jinyoung almost purrs, and Jaebum looks at him as though he’s surprised at being addressed. Younghyun seems a little confused at the obvious tension between them, but allows Jinyoung to link their arms and takes the full wine bottle from his other hand. Jinyoung meets Jaebum’s eyes and says, “we’ll be in my room, so we won’t disturb you.”

There’s a smile attached to it, but it only curls up on one side and the dark circles of his eyes are hard and flat like black glass. His voice oozes sickly sweet between his lips, the  _ so we won’t disturb you  _ like a taunt, filled with vehemence. As though he’s aware of the blade sunk into Jaebum’s abdomen at the sight of them and intends to push it down to the hilt with the implication. 

His resolve both shatters and steels all at once, a confusing flurry of wants and needs at war in the space between pierced ears hidden by long hair. The desire, the ache in his chest he tries to suppress when he wakes up from old dreams and new ones, the want, the image of Jinyoung’s head tipped back for him in a tiny, poorly lit elevator. The need, the expectation of him to get close enough to drain the life from those dark brown eyes even though it feels like the assassin in him has already been killed in a surprise attack. He doesn’t know what to do anymore. Jaebum is balanced on a hair thin wire between responsibility and a want that has buried deeper than a disease. 

So he does nothing. He nods, stoic, adjusting his sleeves above his elbows as Jinyoung clenches his jaw and looks away. 

“Okay. Have fun. I’ll be in the living room reading. Younghyun-ssi, if Jinyoung doesn’t feel like walking you out in the morning, you can come knock on my door and I will escort you.” 

Jinyoung, put off in some way by the detached note of Jaebum’s voice, has already started pulling the other man toward the green room. Younghyun looks back over his shoulder with an apologetic smile and says,

“Thanks, I’ll let you know,” and then they’re disappearing around the corner and, a minute or so later, behind the soft closing of Jinyoung’s bedroom door. 

Alone now, Jaebum stares at the spot on the counter that he has rubbed visible soap circles into and tries to refocus. Now that they’re both out of the room he lets out the breath he’s been holding for what feels like an hour and clenches both hands into fists. Jealousy is ugly, the ugliest of feelings, the direct opposite of what he should be feeling on this mission. 

But the dice have been shaken and rolled. They have spilled across the metaphorical table and he must play the hand he was dealt, a losing one or no. With a sigh, Jaebum turns off the kitchen light and makes his way into the living room to read, though even after half an hour of looking at the same page, he can’t really process it: it’s impossible to focus in the quiet, Jinyoung’s giggles and moans muffled from upstairs in his room, but distantly audible nonetheless. 

Feeling the smallest twinge of exhaustion, Jaebum leans back against the overstuffed cushion of Jinyoung’s couch and places the open book over his face to close his eyes. 

  
  
  


He wakes up later when there’s an abrupt  _ BANG  _ that resonates through the living room as a door slams into a wall and bounces off. The book that had been covering Jaebum’s face as he napped fitfully (and accidentally) hits the floor with a slap that startles him into standing as he groggily tries to locate the noise. Giggling from above his head draws his eyes up to where Jinyoung, dressed only in small cotton shorts and a matching long sleeve shirt, kisses a mostly dressed Younghyun against the balcony. 

“Shhh,” Jinyoung hisses, but loudly; Jaebum blinks himself awake to the realization that Jinyoung is infinitely more drunk than he had been earlier. He watches as Jinyoung presses Younghyun back into the railing for more kissing, whining when he goes to grab the top bar at his hip and misses, sending the side of his face colliding with Younghyun’s neck. 

“You’re telling me to shh,” Younghyun laughs, also sounding very drunk, but at least a little more stable than Jinyoung. He looks over his shoulder and straightens Jinyoung by the tops of his arms and says, “we woke up your bodyguard, I think.”

Jinyoung doesn’t bother to look, making a  _ pfffft  _ noise and urging Younghyun toward the stairs. “Who cares. He’ll be fine.”

“Whoa, whoa,” he laughs, turning when he gets a couple of steps down and Jinyoung turns to follow. “Be careful.”

He isn’t sure what he’s witnessing, or why: he could sit down or look away, but he just watches Jinyoung grip the collar of Younghyun’s grey t-shirt to help steady himself as they make their way down the stairs. The older man catches him at the bottom with an arm around the waist, leaning in to kiss his cheek and smiling even though Jinyoung turns his face away in mock shyness.

“Hey, I know it’s late, but do you mind escorting me to the gate really quick?” Younghyun directs this as Jaebum, who just blinks at him and doesn’t give him a verbal answer. Younghyun seems to get nervous under the weight of Jaebum’s silent gaze and shifts on his feet and away from Jinyoung to slide his arms into his jacket. “It’s okay if you don’t want to, but I just figured––”

“I’ll walk you out,” Jaebum says stiffly, turning and walking off before he can see the two of them exchange a high-browed glance.

When he passes by the kitchen without even grabbing his cardigan off the hook in the greenroom, the LED display on the stove reads 2:47 in angry red letters. Jaebum rubs his eyes and tries to hold in a sigh in case Younghyun is behind him; he’s definitely annoyed by the whole situation and a little feeling a little motion sick from the emotional whiplash he’d given himself earlier, but he doesn’t want to outwardly present that way. It’s one thing to seem cold but it’s another entirely to give either of them a reason to think he actually  _ feels  _ something. 

As he opens the door with Younghyun right on his heels, Jaebum waves down the security guard at the gate and motions for him to open it. On any other night he would walk him to it and see him out of it, but there’s a part of him that doesn’t want to, and so he makes himself content to stand in the doorway and watch him leave from here.

“Hey, thanks for––” Younghyun stops as he steps out, pulling his jacket closer. “Uh, thanks for––”

“Just go,” Jaebum says roughly, pointing to the iron gate as it creaks open just enough for him to get through. He’s not interested in hearing whatever imaginary thing that Younghyun could come with to thank him for and feels that the attempt at filling a decidedly very awkward silence is unnecessary.

Dismissed, Younghyun jogs down the lawn toward the gate and slips out of it without looking back. The cold wind whipping around the house sucks the air out of Jaebum’s lungs as he stands on the porch until the gate closes and the night guard gives him a thumbs up. The wrinkled folds of his dress shirt where it has come slightly untucked from his slacks flaps noisily against the bare skin of his hip until he takes a deep breath and heads back inside. 

When he gets back into the living room, he’s surprised to see Jinyoung sitting on the couch with his cheek in his palm and his elbow resting against the back cushion, dark eyes closed but clearly still awake. He’d expected Jinyoung to clumsily stagger back up the stairs and pass out on his bed; this is, of course, what he’d been hoping for, but as Jinyoung seems to sense his presence and opens his eyes, it becomes clear that the night for them is not quite over. No matter how badly he wants it to be. 

For a moment, in a sort of repeat of the first time they had done this, they just stare at each other. Jinyoung watches him with sleep and drink heavy eyes where he stands just inside the arch of the living room, backed by the greenroom streaked with moonlight through the cheesecloth curtains. Jaebum watches him back, for lack of anything else to do. He notices that Jinyoung’s hair is still damp from a shower and, against his will, that the off-white hems of his shorts have ridden dangerously high up the unmarked skin of his thighs where his legs are folded under him on the couch.

“Sejin,” Jinyoung mumbles, redirecting his attention. Jaebum tries to hold his eyes, but they’re half closed.

“Do you want me to help you upstairs?” he asks, not moving from his spot, waiting to see if Jinyoung just decides to fall asleep on the couch or if he’ll ask to be dumped into his bed. Either way, Jaebum can feel that same prickle on the back of his neck when Jinyoung blinks his eyes open wider and holds his gaze with a headiness that he shouldn’t. 

“I want you to sit next to me so we can talk a little bit.”

“No thank you,” Jaebum says automatically, because it is obstinately the worst idea in the world. 

“Well I don’t feel like going to bed yet.”

“Are you sure? You’re pretty drunk.”

Jinyoung snorts, and the movement of his head when he does it full-bodied almost makes him fall backward. He catches himself with a fistful of couch cushion and resumes his former position before grabbing the remote and holding it out to him. 

“Let’s watch a movie or something.”

_ “You  _ can watch a movie,” Jaebum says, but the night has felt so long and through the exhaustion he can feel his resolve worn down to the baldness of a stone at the bottom of a river. 

“C’mon, Sejin,” he nearly pleads, voice thick and low from all the wine. Jaebum wonders briefly if both of the bottles are empty now and decides it doesn’t matter. “I’ll even let you pick.”

If there is one thing he knows about Jinyoung that has not changed, it’s that he’s stubborn. It will be easier to just do what he asks of him for a little bit rather than argue about it, and now that it’s edging on 3 in the morning, Jaebum doesn’t feel much like arguing or storming off. With a sigh Jaebum goes to the couch, pulling at the tops of his pant legs to adjust before sitting down with a good two feet in between them. He takes the remote from Jinyoung’s hand without looking at him and flips through the options, ignoring the younger man’s stare on the side of his head. 

He picks something at random, not bothering to read the description or the title; if he had he would have likely picked something else, being that in the first quiet fifteen minutes of them watching from their places on the couch, there has already been a sex scene and the implication that whatever is going to come is going to come anxiously, and with lots of pain. Jaebum has never much believed in the power of omens but there is something too heavy in the air to deny the power of it.

After a while, he notices that Jinyoung has spent careful minutes inching closer and closer to him as though it is accidental. Jaebum finally notices it when he feels the warmth of Jinyoung’s knee pressing into his thigh and the cushion behind his head depressing just enough to be conspicuous as Jinyoung leans on his elbow again. His heart skips and starts to beat uncomfortably in his chest: it feels too close, sharing their warmth, conjuring up the muscle memory of the way it had felt in the elevator. Jinyoung breathes quietly with his head turned toward the screen, seemingly calm and relaxed despite the points of contact. 

“What movie is this?” 

Jinyoung’s voice is low and thrums with alcohol where it’s close to his ear. Jaebum shifts but doesn’t move away. 

“It’s called Happy Together.” 

He snorts almost like he finds this ironic. “Have you ever watched any of my films, Sejin-ssi?”

Just by proxy. He never stayed in the room to watch anything that Jinyoung was in when the boys would watch them, only catching glimpses of him here and there if he absolutely couldn’t avoid passing through the same room. He closes his eyes. 

“No.” 

“Mm.” Jinyoung hums in affirmation and goes quiet for a while. Jaebum thinks he can finally maybe relax when Jinyoung sighs and leans into him drunkenly, face slipping from his palm and his forearm hanging off Jaebum’s shoulder.

“Hyung.”

“Don’t call me that––”

“Are you ever going to admit that you lied?” he asks abruptly, cutting Jaebum off before he could reprimand him for the title. Jinyoung’s head tilts down to look at where his right hand touches Jaebum’s knee gently with one finger, and that alone is enough to make Jaebum’s entire body stretch tight like a high wire.

“About what?”

Jinyoung scoffs but doesn’t look up at him, too focused on the way the dark navy of Jaebum’s slacks shift with the movement of his finger as he guides it in lazy little circles just above his knee. Jaebum swallows. 

“Wanting to kiss me in the elevator.” 

“I didn’t––”

“Didn’t want to kiss me?” He  _ hmphs  _ a little laugh, but there’s not much humor in it. It almost sounds sad and it makes Jaebum’s heart do something that it shouldn’t. “I don’t believe you.”

“Well, you don’t have to believe me––”

“I don’t,” Jinyoung interrupts again, this time flattening his palm down on his thigh and squeezing it like he’s frustrated. He looks up into Jaebum’s face, eyes wide and unreadable, handsome face still flushed nearly bright red with wine. 

“Jinyoung––”

The nails of Jinyoung’s fingers when they dig into the inside of his thigh as he bears his weight down to shift more to face him sends sparks racing up his legs and all the way up his spine to the back of his neck. He makes a noise in the back of his throat, but it gets buried underneath the flood of words suddenly pouring out of Jinyoung’s mouth where he’s nearly sitting on Jaebum’s leg:

“Why can’t you just be honest? For one second? I get you’re some tough, unreachable bodyguard or whatever, but you’re going to deny that you felt even a little something in the elevator? When I was there and felt it too?” 

The movie plays on in the background, muted colors flashing against the side of Jinyoung’s face, dyeing the black rings of his eyes in an oscillating rainbow as he pins Jaebum to the couch with a look. Sweat prickles at the nape of his neck, his chest heavy, that same ache he has tried to bury over and over starting up again in the hollows of his chest when a very drunk Jinyoung sways forward and digs his fingers harder into his leg for balance. The air between their bodies has nearly evaporated, overpowered by the handsome scent of him, teakwood and mint soap mixed with his skin and punctuated with the bitter sweetness of rosé wine on his lips. Jaebum’s heart pounds unevenly in his chest as Jinyoung’s other hand finds his shoulder and grips it, hard, as though any less pressure and Jaebum might disappear. 

Jinyoung licks his plump lips and they shine wetly in the light from the television. Something in his heart fractures and breaks; it is hard to say why it hurts so much to breathe when Jinyoung is looking at him like this. But it does and he nearly gasps with the pain of it.

“Jinyoung,” he says, and hates the way that Jinyoung follows the movement of his lips when his tongue wets them nervously, hates the way he follows the line of his throat when he swallows as Jinyoung’s hand on his thigh slips higher and he catches his balance. He hates most of all the way his voice trembles when he says his name. “You’re drunk––”

“Maybe,” he says, and the boatneck collar of his loose, long sleeve shirt slips down his lowered shoulder to reveal a collarbone marked neatly with a few bruising hickies. The sight of them along the bone not made with his own mouth makes bile rise up the back of his throat and he has to swallow it or choke. Jinyoung’s voice is breathless and urgent. “Maybe, but I know I still want you, and I know you want me, too, hyung, don’t you? I don’t know why I want you, I shouldn’t want someone so cold to me, but I feel drawn to you, hyung. I can feel it, I can feel it even when you brush against me––”

_ “Jinyoung,”  _ Jaebum gasps, startled, grabbing the wrist of the hand slipping further up his thigh as he sways again, nearly too drunk to hold his own weight. The heat of Jaebum’s hand around the skin of his wrist makes the younger boy gasp and he suddenly pulls both of his hands away, yanking his wrist from Jaebum’s grip to hide his face behind both of his palms.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and takes a deep breath, but they both shudder and shake on the verge of tears. He wipes his eyes with one hand and puts the other back on Jaebum’s leg for support and pulls at his own hair with the other while his thin chest heaves with tears that want to fall but won’t allow. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, this seems crazy, I seem so crazy, right? Sejin-ssi, I’m sorry, it’s just––” his voice hiccups on a gasp that seems to hurt like a displaced rib, “you just remind me of someone that I used to know and it hurts, god, it hurts––”

Ice forms all along the length of his spine, pulling every muscle in his body to the tightest point, so wound up he would snap like a rubber band if pulled in any direction. A breath catches in his chest at the words  _ you just remind me of someone that I used to know  _ and his heart takes a moment to fail him before coming back to life in an unforgiving rhythm. It pounds so hard he can feel it in his neck: his pulse throbs in the hollow of his throat as he grabs Jinyoung’s wrist again and breathes, 

“Who?” 

But there is no giant reveal; Jinyoung doesn’t leap to his feet and point at him to say  _ AHA! It was you all along!  _ Instead he just wipes his wet eyes again and hiccups another gasp before smiling this rueful smile and twisting his wrist in Jaebum’s grip.

“Do you care?” 

“It’s my job to care,” he says automatically; it sounds just as breathless but Jinyoung either doesn’t really notice or doesn’t care why. Jaebum doesn’t let go of his wrist and Jinyoung doesn’t pull away.

“Yeah. Your job this, your job that. Whatever. Does it matter?”

Jaebum tries to soften his voice, but his heartbeat is absolutely ringing in his ears so he’s not sure how it sounds, if it sounds robotic or genuine. “If it matters to you.”

Either way, Jinyoung must not care, because he sighs heavily and digs the heel of one hand into his eye.

“I––” he sniffles. “It’s been a long time. I don’t know if it matters anymore, honestly. But they were my friends. My family. None of us had any family worth anything so we made our own and I just––” his breath hitches again, “––I left them like it didn’t mean anything.”

His whole body feels like it has been coated in ice, despite the warmth of Jinyoung’s body where he’s nearly sitting on his lap. The whole time Jaebum had been here Jinyoung had never once spoken of his past, except to talk about the parents who had adopted him when he moved into the city, but before that was a black hole if Jaebum didn’t already know the truth of it. He had made so many assumptions in the time that Jinyoung had been gone and in the time that he had been here with him that to hear Jinyoung say the words makes the distance feel more real than ever before and it hurts like a shovel to the chest. 

“Why? Why’d you leave them?” Jaebum whispers, his grip tightening on Jinyoung’s wrist. If Jinyoung notices he doesn’t say anything, eyes wide and wet as he stares at the center of Jaebum’s throat like he’s trying not to cry.

“It was so hard,” Jinyoung finally starts to say, his voice barely a whisper, and Jaebum leans up to hear him over the music of the movie still playing behind them and lighting Jinyoung up in a halo. “It was so hard.  I don’t––god, they were my family. But I was scared. The things that I saw and did, the things I saw them do. The things I saw him do.” his breath catches and wavers dangerously on the  _ him  _ and Jaebum’s heart feels ready to burst. “I saw the direction they were going in and I couldn’t do it, and god, that night when he showed up and I––I shouldn’t have done it––”

“What did you do, Jinyoung?” Jaebum asks breathlessly, so much closer to his face now that he’s leaning up, and he can feel the wind of his breath when Jinyoung’s resolve breaks and a half-formed sob leaves his lips. The arm that he’d been using to hold himself up on Jaebum’s shoulder bends at the elbow and he collapses with it, face buried in Jaebum’s shoulder; he wraps an arm around Jinyoung’s back to steady him and fists a hand in the thin material of his shirt. He gasps at the feeling of Jinyoung’s lips on his neck, talking and not kissing. 

“It doesn’t matter. It’s been a long time. It’s the past.”

“Jinyoung.” 

“I’m sorry,” he breathes, hot enough against Jaebum’s neck to raise goosebumps on his arms where his sleeves are rolled up. One of Jinyoung’s hands fists in the front of Jaebum’s shirt. “Can you just take me to bed? I don’t feel well. I won’t ask you to do it again, I promise, I’m sorry––”

Without replying directly, Jaebum shifts to stand and pulls Jinyoung up his feet by the grip on his wrist. Jinyoung’s body hits his, chest to chest, long arms immediately wrapping around his neck and keeping his face buried in the warmth of his collar. Jinyoung mutters under his breath as Jaebum carefully walks him backward around the table and toward the stairs, but his mind is whirring too fast with the words that Jinyoung had spoken, a tiny death and birth occurring all at once in his solar plexus.

When they finally make it up to Jinyoung’s room, Jaebum sees the two empty wine bottles placed neatly on the bedside table and bites back a sigh. He wonders how much of that he drank himself and then wonders how much of that was because of the way he’s been feeling, about how he thinks of Jaebum-not-Jaebum reminding him of some long lost ghost. His heartbeat still pounds but it has taken on a more sluggish rhythm now, aching, everything he has ever known to be true crushed to dust in his hands in the matter of minutes. 

As he leans down to gently lay Jinyoung on the bed, the younger man grabs the collar of his shirt and pulls him down with him. Jaebum grunts in surprise as he hits the bed on his elbows on either side of Jinyoung’s neck, their chests bumping roughly with the suddenness of it. Jinyoung’s lips part and he thinks Jinyoung is going to kiss him but he just drops his head down against the pillow and looks into his eyes from his half-lidded ones and curls his fingers tighter in Jaebum’s shirt collar. 

After a moment of looking between both of his eyes from the short distance of maybe three inches, Jinyoung swallows and exhales on a tired breath. He should pull away––he should have gotten up immediately, not letting himself be pulled down at all, but the universe had long ago determined that the polarization of their bodies were magnets and even across the distance of time and heartbreak Jaebum could not resist the pull of it. He licks his lips as Jinyoung’s fingers brush against his throat and the ends of his long hair where some of it has fallen out from behind his ears. 

“You remind me of him,” Jinyoung whispers, like he’s telling Jaebum a secret. He blinks tiredly and lets go of his collar and runs the backs of his fingers of one hand along the length of his throat. Heat pools in Jaebum’s groin, coupled with the ache in his stomach and chest, so many conflicting emotions pulling and twisting him in so many different directions that he feels like a rubik’s cube. 

“Who, Jinyoung?” 

“My hyung, he…” Jinyoung’s fingers turn to their tips as he traces Jaebum’s jaw, eyelids drooping, exhausted from the drinking and the crying and the intensity that they can’t seem to escape from. He tries not to shudder as Jinyoung does it but he does, anyway, eyes half closing and lips parting when Jinyoung runs them along his cheek. His heart drops into the pit of his stomach when Jinyoung touches underneath his eyebrow, right over the place where his moles would be if he didn’t painstakingly cover them up every single morning and sometimes at night, too. He wonders if he’d somehow forgotten and freezes as Jinyoung’s fingers trace the spot where they lurk just beneath his fingertips.

“He had two moles right here. They were so pretty. He didn’t know this, but I used to look at them every time we were together and count them over and over even though the number never changed. One, two. Just like there was two of us…” he mumbles, eyes slipping closed for a moment before he struggles to blink them open again. When they do, they meet his, and there is a startling awareness in them for someone as drunk as him. His voice is low and slushy when he says,

“You remind me so much of him it hurts.” 

Once again his body flashes in various waves of hot and cold, the sharp dagger in his chest buried deeper and twisted until he feels like he could collapse right here and never take another ragged breath. His breathing shallows and turns hollow as Jinyoung’s hand slips back, onto the back of his neck and resting there for a burning moment before it slides up into the slightly damp, thick strands of his dark hair. Jinyoung’s lips part on a noise; it’s a gasp, or a whimper, or the start of a sob that won’t come, or maybe all three. But his eyes have finally lost the struggle to stay open when Jaebum licks his own lips in anticipation of something he know won’t come as Jinyoung’s fingers loosen in his hair.

“I miss my Jaebum hyung,” Jinyoung whispers, and an arrow pierces Jaebum’s heart. 

His arm shakes as he leans on it to grab Jinyoung’s wrist and gently pull his hand away from his neck, laying it across his chest as Jinyoung starts to loosen into sleep. Jaebum’s breath tears quietly out of his chest, heat prickling behind his eyes but his face as stoic as ever despite the way his whole world is razed to the ground with the two whispered syllables of his name from Jinyoung’s mouth. After all this time and it could still do this to him, tear him in two; he didn’t know that he’d been missing the sound of it on Jinyoung’s tongue for all these years until it had finally given it to him, a man starved. 

“I’m sure he misses you too, Jinyoung,” he says, stiff and awkward with the way he bites his back teeth down to hurting, careful not to break and say  _ I miss you, too, god, I’ve missed you for so long.  _

Jinyoung lets his eyes close and his breathing steady, no longer hanging onto him. “I don’t think so,” he mumbles, so thick that Jaebum can barely understand it as he rolls onto his side. “He must hate me, but I still love him. Goodnight, Sejin-ssi.” 

His body goes on autopilot. He says  _ goodnight, Jinyoung,  _ in the most robotic tone he’s ever heard come from his own mouth. Jaebum flicks off the bedside lamp to cast his room into darkness, not even out of the door before Jinyoung starts to snore softly in a heavy, drunk sleep. He closes the door behind him with a hollow heartbeat ringing in the emptiness of his chest, mechanically going into his own room and sitting down on the edge of the bed to stare a hole into the carpet between his feet.

_ But I still love him.  _

He blinks his eyes furiously as they begin to water and the sound of Jinyoung’s voice saying his name and then  _ but I still love him  _ repeats over and over like a broken record, skipping backward. His whole body aches and burns as though it had been set on fire and if it were possible he would think that Jinyoung had flayed him open with just his words, grabbed his tender heart with one hand and ripped it out, digging the fingers of his other hand in the raw edges of the wound until he had no blood left to bleed. The world he had known has fallen, razed to ruins, and he is alone in the rubble of it.

Jaebum puts his face in his hands. The tears come slowly at first, then harder, then they don’t stop for a long, long time.

 


	10. 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  
> 
> [like daylight through a stained-glass window](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=my+true+name+bloc+party)  
> our colours run  
> 

 

The worst part of his revelation is not the revelation itself but the loneliness in which he must endure it. After sitting on the edge of a strange bed in a strange house with a not-so-strange man confessing to all the things that the darkest, deepest wells of Jaebum’s bitter heart had ached for over the years but wouldn’t allow himself to want or even feel and crying for hours he had come to the revelation that arrived so much faster than he anticipated.

_ I can’t kill him.  _

And yet there’s still a part of him that aches to do so. The part that is the man he built himself to be, pieced together from the John Waynes and the James Deans and the Lee Byunghyuns he had known from fiction, the one who did not let sentiment cloud his judgement or love stay his hand because he had no real love to give. The other part, the loneliest part, is his pride: despite coming to the realization that he could not kill Park Jinyoung like he once hoped he might be able to as the sun broke on a cold and misty horizon, there was no one to tell. His pride could not take the beating it would receive from a chorus of  _ I told you so’s  _ if he were to call home. And so he must suffer it alone, eyes red and body tired from the bullet holes of Jinyoung’s words. 

The morning after, Jaebum had not slept. After he managed to wash some of the misery from his face with ice water in the sink he had changed his clothes and finger combed his hair back behind his ears again. His heart ached and his head throbbed with the repeated words and touches that Jinyoung had offered him like sacrament, though unintentional, and the constant circulation of it makes his stomach feel sick. Nevertheless, he pulls on a white turtleneck and black jeans under a long, gray duster and goes to wake Jinyoung from what is undoubtedly a dead, hungover sleep. 

When he steps into the room, Jinyoung is splayed out on the bed diagonally, one arm hanging off and his other limbs spread out like a four pointed stair. His cheeks no longer carry the flush of alcohol but they are still a little pink; sweat dampens his forehead and neck where the parts of his hair that will reach stick welty to his skin. The loose-necked long sleeve shirt he’s wearing has ridden up to his chest, revealing a stretch of flat, tanned stomach. Jaebum quickly looks away from it and into his face, startled when Jinyoung’s eyes are open and fixed on him. 

It’s quiet for a moment. Jaebum stands in the doorway, unsure if Jinyoung is actually awake or just fell asleep with his eyes open; it’s actually quite unsettling, and after the events of the night before it makes him feel even uneasier. He’s about to just back out of the room and leave when he sees Jinyoung’s tongue wet his lips and he croaks,

“Am I dead?” 

Despite all the ill feeling in his own chest, Jaebum actually laughs. It’s quiet, but real, and Jinyoung’s eyes close with a satisfied smile he doesn’t quite think he deserves.

“No, you’re not dead,” Jaebum says softly. There’s no more and no less emotion in his voice than there would usually be, and he is careful to monitor his words and tone. “But you might be, if you have a schedule today.” 

Jinyoung groans and screws his eyes shut. “Do I have a schedule today?”

“I don’t know. Ask your manager.” 

With another groan, Jinyoung blindly sweeps at his bedside table for the cellphone lying at the edge of it. He grabs it and holds it out to Jaebum all without opening his eyes. 

“Can you check? I feel like if I look into the light of my phone screen, it might sear my eyeballs.”

“Hungover, huh?” Jaebum asks. He comes over and takes the phone gently from Jinyoung’s hand, careful to avoid touching his fingers and sitting as far away from his body as possible when he lowers himself to perch on the edge of the bed. Jinyoung cracks an eye open in surprise, but Jaebum doesn’t care and doesn’t acknowledge it. 

“Nope, no schedule today,” he says, locking the screen and tossing it lightly back onto Jinyoung’s nightstand. The younger man looks at him through the tiny gap of his open eye in the grey light of the morning. “But you have to film something in Busan next Wednesday, and be back in the morning on Thursday for something else.” 

Jinyoung groans preemptively and covers his face with a pillow. “Can we just cancel it?”

“It’s next week. You’ll be fine.”

Moving the pillow, Jinyoung lifts his head a little to look at him but most decide that it hurts too much as he drops it right away again. This doesn’t stop him from looking at Jaebum suspiciously, though; one eyebrow is raised and his gaze is roaming curiously around Jaebum’s profile like it could give him some sort of answer.

“What happened last night? Did we…?” Jinyoung asks, gesturing between them vaguely, although from the bruises on various parts of Jinyoung’s body that he can see, Jaebum gets the idea pretty quick.

“No! God, no.” 

“Okay, jeez. You don’t have to say it like that,” he huffs, offended. “If it wasn’t us, then…?” 

Jaebum tries with some difficulty to ignore the images that arise when Jinyoung says  _ if it wasn’t us.  _ He clears his throat quietly and says, “someone named Kang Younghyun came over.” 

“Oh!” Jinyoung exclaims, and winces at his own volume. “Yeah, his band did an entire soundtrack for one of my movies. Saw him the first day and managed to hook up with him like six hours later. He was here last night?”

There’s a sinking feeling in his gut that Jinyoung was so drunk that he doesn’t remember anything he has said or done after Younghyun left. If he doesn’t even remember that Younghyun is the one who came over and that they slept together, then is it possible that Jinyoung doesn’t remember anything that happened between them? Jaebum can’t decide if this is the best case scenario or the worst. Part of him thinks it’s good, meaning he can concentrate on finding a way out of this, even if it means death for himself. But the other part, the part that lurks in the corners and has done so for years, yearns to hear Jinyoung repeat the words he has said, sober, to know that he really meant them. 

_ I still love him.  _

“Hyung…?” Jinyoung says softly, waving a hand tiredly in front of Jaebum’s face as closely as his arm can reach from his current position. Jaebum blinks and looks at him, face clean of emotion, but perhaps just the tiniest bit tired at the corners. 

“What?”

The corner of his mouth pulls up in a tired smile. “You haven’t reprimanded me yet.”

Jaebum doesn’t respond, just blinks. He isn’t sure that he could come up with a good excuse, anyway. 

“And you’re being…nice.” 

“Is that bad?”

“No,” he says, his eyebrows furrowing, hesitating like he’s trying to recall something too far away and difficult to find. “But it’s different. Something happened between us last night, didn’t it?” 

Jaebum, aware that Jinyoung’s lack of complete memory from the previous night presents him with the perfect opportunity to lie, struggles with whether or not he should. It has given them, Jinyoung and Sejin, in its own way, the chance to start over. He knows intrinsically that it will never be the same as it was knowing what he knows about the way Jinyoung has felt over the years of his absence, but it does not and cannot change the fact that he still left, and has yet to really say why. Jaebum, still staring at his hands, hesitates before answering to carefully consider the angle in which he approaches. 

“Not really,” he lies, with some difficulty. “But you did mention to me after I saved your house from burning down that you hate that we don’t get along. So the least I can do is be…” he hesitates, hating the look on Jinyoung’s face. It is innocently hopeful, like Jaebum-not-Jaebum has brought him a precious stone. As though the man he sees as Sejin could provide him some sort of relief form his feelings about a certain hyung not knowing that the man is right in front of him and it makes him feel slightly ill. 

But he presses on. He swallows, “nicer.”

“You can say ‘friendly’, you know,” Jinyoung says, smiling softly, and it hurts his heart to know that he is still keeping so much of the truth from him. “It won’t kill you.” 

“I’m not here to be your friend,” Jaebum says quietly, looking at his hands. But his tone is not harsh. It is more gentle than it should be, more a reminder than a reprimand. Jinyoung seems to take it as such and the smile curls deeper on his mouth. 

“But you let me call you hyung.”

Something in his heart feels like treason when he nods. “Yes. You can call me hyung, if you’d like. But,” he adds, watching Jinyoung’s face glow, “only in the house. When I am working, please refer to me as -ssi.” 

“Sure, hyung,” Jinyoung says with a satisfied grin. Jaebum’s heart drops into his stomach: has he made a mistake in letting Jinyoung call him hyung in private? Perhaps. But god, it feels so good, and his guilty heart soaks up the feeling of Jinyoung referring to him as hyung like a sponge. The accompanying squeeze hurts like pushing on a bruise but the pain is good enough not to stop. 

Jaebum stands up awkwardly, looking at the bedside table and not at the length of Jinyoung’s neck or exposed stomach when he bows backward to stretch. “Get up and take a shower. I’ll cook something for breakfast and maybe you’ll feel better.”

Laughing, Jinyoung sits up and covers one eye with the heel of his hand like even the low sunlight filtering in through thick curtains hurts his eyes. 

“Careful, hyung. If you’re too nice, people might start to think you like me.” 

_ It’s so, so much more than that.  _

Jaebum just nods. “Let them think what they want.” 

Their eyes meet when Jinyoung lowers his hand and blinks up at him, holding Jaebum’s gaze like he and he alone is able. His voice is a featherweight when he asks, 

“And what’s the truth, hyung?”

He pauses in the doorway, holding the frame with one hand.  _ Oh, Jinyoung,  _ he thinks miserably. 

“Pain,” he says, disappearing from the doorway before he can catch the puzzled look on Jinyoung’s face. 

  
  


***

 

The nature of their relationship changes, both directly and indirectly. Jinyoung being allowed to call him hyung in private has done something to his brain, Jaebum thinks; he wonders sometimes in the days leading up to Jinyoung’s out of town schedule if he made a mistake in allowing it, but his traitor’s heart is too hooked on the sound of it in his mouth to take it back. 

His traitor’s heart allows him the pleasure, too: Jinyoung’s body becomes a magnet for his eyes in the worst of ways, and he finds more often than not that Jinyoung catches him looking. Jaebum isn’t sure if this is a direct result of what had happened a few nights before, heir proximity, the desperation in which Jinyoung had wanted to hear him say that not wanting to kiss him was a lie, the way he had slipped his fingers into Jaebum’s hair on his neck like it was the last piece of a puzzle finally falling into place. All of this collects in the pit of his chest and stomach like rainwater. He wakes up often in a cold sweat with stark images of Jinyoung in various states of undress pressed against his eyelids. In the current thundering storm of conflict in his heart, the added underlying tension between them pulled taut like a wire is the last thing he needs. 

He remembers something that one of the older kids in the neighborhood had taught him once, before he disappeared, thrown in jail or possibly killed. The older boy had been teaching him how to use fishing line to set up traps for all sorts of debauchery, pulling it taut between two trees and pressing down on it with a hand until it bowed:

_ But don’t put too much pressure on a tight wire,  _ he had said, with all the wisdom he didn’t know he possessed.  _ If you push too much on it, it’s going to snap.  _

Never in his life has Jaebum felt more like a strung wire being pushed on with both hands.

Regardless of his inner turmoil, the days leading up to Jinyoung’s trip and post-drunken breakdown (that Jinyoung has little to no recollection of—Jaebum has tested this theory multiple times over the days they spend in alone periods, like at night in the house or in the car driving to schedules) he tries to remain steadfast and keeps a reasonable distance that clearly puts Jinyoung off in his way but knows he can’t argue. The times he slips up and calls him hyung in public are met with a clenched jaw and, later, a private reprimand. 

“I didn’t mean to,” Jinyoung always says, lips pushed out in a pout. It always makes Jaebum grip the steering wheel harder. 

“I agreed to let you call me hyung in private,” he says. “If you can’t adhere to that, then you can call me Sejin-ssi all the time so as not to confuse you.” 

“I’m not stupid,” Jinyoung snaps, on a particularly bad day where he had done it multiple times and Jaebum had corrected him coldly in front of magazine staff. 

“I know you aren’t.”

“Then don’t explain it to me like I am,” he bites, turning his head away to look out the window. Jaebum glances over at where the black turtleneck he has on ends just under the place where his jaw is clenched and shifting as he grinds his teeth. “You’re so hot and cold, hyung. It’s exhausting.” 

“Hot and cold?” 

“I never know what to expect with you,” Jinyoung continues as though he hasn’t spoken, arms  crossed and still turned toward the window and looking out of it as though he’s talking to himself. “Like, you were so cold when you first arrived. Then you warmed a little. And then you almost kissed me, so you were warm a lot. Then you got cold again saying you didn’t want to, and then warm again after I got drunk and brought Younghyun over. Now you’re back to being cold. Can’t you see how exhausting that is?”

Of course he knows how exhausting it is—he’s the one who has to  _ feel  _ it. The truth of it is that he doesn’t know what else to do with himself; the war raging inside him between his head and so many different fractured pieces of his heart has turned him into someone he doesn’t recognize. Someone confused and insecure. The only confidence he has left to cash in on is the facade in which he portrays that he is a cold, detached bodyguard and nothing more, and the confusion comes from the traitor inside him.

“I’m not trying to be cold,” he says. “I’m just trying to do my job.”

Jinyoung sighs like he’s heard this excuse a thousand time and rests his chin in his hand. 

“Yeah, hyung. I know.” 

 

***

 

The day that Jinyoung’s out of town shoot comes, the both of them are feeling a little worn down from the tension that has built on top of both of them seemingly out of nowhere. Despite the friendliness that Jaebum has showed him the morning after his drunken, blacked out break down, they’ve reverted almost entirely to the way it had been before: quiet, tense, and like they’ve never spoken a word to each other in their lives. 

He’s trying not to dwell on it, though. 

The airport is a good distraction: Jaebum gets a sense taste of the depth of Jinyoung’s pockets when they arrive; he’s told at the check-in desk that Jinyoung’s small, private plane is on the strip and waiting for them whenever they clear through security. Jaebum is floored—it’s not that he’s not used to extravagant wealth, because he is, seeing that being a hitman in itself is a lucrative job and he has that times 6, but even so, he could never imagine the six of them having a private plane to pick them up to take them somewhere as close as  _ Busan.  _ When he has suggested they just take the train, Jinyoung had laughed. 

“And be swarmed by paparazzi and fans the whole time? I don’t think so. The airport will be bad enough.” 

Of course, he was right. Under suggestion from the front gate guards, Jaebum hired more security from Jinyoung’s team to accompany them as they pushed their way through a flashing crowd of cameras and fans at the airport almost the minute he steps from the car. Jaebum is uncomfortable with the amount of cameras flashing in his face. He had gone so far as to wear sunglasses and a black mask of his own, but even in his long coat with the collar popped and his long hair pushed behind his ear, he still feels too exposed to the public to feel good about it. If it was just his life that was threatened by exposure it wouldn’t matter as much but there are five over lives that depend on his discretion and the cameras make him nervous. 

As they head toward security after check in, shoulder to shoulder with other guards and using one hand out to create a cut in the crowd for them to pass, he feels Jinyoung’s fingers curl tightly in the material of his shirt near his stomach. He can tell that Jinyoung is a little nervous so Jaebum instinctively grabs his wrist with his free hand and holds it close to his body as they walk, Jinyoung’s chest pressed up against his back so tightly he thinks he can feel where his heart beats quicker at the contact. He just hopes that Jinyoung can’t feel the muscle in his stomach jump when his fingers dig in and the expansion of his chest when he inhales a sharp breath.

“It’s okay, hyung,” he says in his ear. Jaebum clenches his jaw and pushes forward until they’re all outside and free from the crush of a an adoring crowd screaming Jinyoung’s name. 

He pulls away immediately, taking a deep breath as the other guards they’d brought head toward the tiny plane for an inspection. Jaebum looks down and tucks his shirt back into his slacks where Jinyoung had pulled it out and doesn’t notice that he’s watching. 

“Not a fan of crowds?” 

The question startles him. Jaebum straightens and blinks at him in confusion. 

“What do you mean?”

Jinyoung smiles, but it seems private, as though he’s told himself a joke. “I could feel your heart racing.” 

He should be ashamed. More than anything he should be ashamed that even the smallest infraction of this kind should have been caught, but instead a dirty thrill chases down his back at the idea of it. 

But he doesn’t respond to it. “Come on,” he says, looking away, and touching Jinyoung’s shoulder lightly to turn him in the direction of the private plane waiting for them. “Let’s go.”

 

*** 

 

The flight lasts about four hours, and it’s a four hours that he spends sitting in a seat next to Jinyoung but actively ignoring him. Not that Jinyoung tries very hard to get his attention all that much beyond a  _ Sejin-ssi do you want something to drink?  _ and a perfunctory  _ are you alright?  _ Both of which Jaebum manages to brush off with a nod and a small wave of his hand. Jinyoung, who would normally be put off by this, merely focuses on his phone where he holds it in his lap and scrolls. 

The tension is palpable, amplified by what happened at the airport, but he’s reluctant to admit it. He’s reluctant to admit that his feelings have changed. He’s reluctant to admit that his main goal now is to find a way out of this situation where everyone remains alive and there’s no long, bloody shootout like there always seems to be in the movies. He doesn’t know if that’s possible anymore, if he’s being honest with himself, and the idea of it makes him feel a little sick. In all of his years as a hitman he never thought he’d see the day where he would have to consider the idea of putting himself in a grave in order to save the person it was dug for.

Nevertheless, the situation doesn’t get any easier, and by the time they make it to set and Jinyoung is whisked off to leave him by himself in the rental car, he still doesn’t have any answers. He wonders if he’ll ever have an answer. Probably not, because when has his life ever been easy?

Sighing, he pushes the seat all the way back so he can comfortably stretch out his legs and leans back with his phone in his hand. Jinyoung’s manager had said to him in a (very) last minute email that the shoot might not be very long, but that it would be late: they had arrived at the airport long after sundown, and driving to the set of the shoot took another two hours, and it is well into the night by the time Jaebum has comfortably pulled up the news to distract himself with something that isn’t the repeated banging of JInyoung’s existence against every inch of his being. 

Two hours pass in the blink of an eye. Jaebum checks the time and then locks his phone to drop it in his lap and yawn, rubbing his face with both hands to try and scrub away the exhaustion that has seemed to appear from nowhere.  He fiddles with the radio for a moment; Jaebum is about to give up and turn it off when his personal phone buzzes in his pocket and makes him jump.

When he pulls it out, he sees that Bambam had sent him a picture message, but with no caption. Jaebum frowns and opens it, his heart taking a dive as three little dots signal Bambam’s eventual explosion over the photo that he’d sent.

It’s of him, and despite the mask pulled up high over the bridge of his nose and the dark, mirrored sunglasses on his face, it is undeniably himself. Anyone who knows Jaebum as intimately as the boys and some of the sunbaes from the company would know that it is him in a heartbeat, regardless of all his identifiable characteristics being hidden. In the photo that Bambam had sent followed by tens of a repeated surprised face emoji shaped like a cat, Jaebum has one arm out to clear a path in the crowd of people while Jinyoung clings to his back with his face nearly buried between his shoulders. His lips are pressed tightly together, a surreal feeling overcoming him as he looks at a photo of himself frowning so hard his dark eyebrows are nearly halved by the rims of the sunglasses on his face. From the angle in which the picture was taken he can see Jinyoung’s hand clutched tightly in the front of his shirt and his own hand wrapped protectively around his wrist. Jaebum swallows and notices that the bottom right of the photo boasts the logo of a very popular gossip website.

He only has to wait a moment for Bambam’s comment: 

_ Holy shit, hyung. this is you.  _

Quickly, he replies,  _ Yes, Bam. That’s me.  _

_ Do you know what this website said about u and jinyoung hyung?  _

_ What?  _ God, it was posted online? Jaebum closes his eyes and grips his phone hard while waiting for Bambam’s reply. It’s bad enough that it’s nearly one in the morning and Jinyoung still hasn’t emerged, but to have their photo posted all over the internet with an accompanying rumor and he can’t even ask Jinyoung to dispel it right away? The idea of getting recognized in any capacity makes the muscle in his stomach cramp with anxiety. At this point he has accepted that he’d rather something happen to himself than the other six. .

On the heels of that, his traitorous brain says,  _ so it’s six again, huh?  _

Jaebum sighs and looks down when Bambam’s reply comes through.

_ They’re saying that you guys are dating. Well, they’re speculating ur dating. It’s from a gossip site so no one REALLY believes that stuff but still, that’s what they’re saying , especially bc you’re a new bodyguard. Did u know that people all over the internet are obsessed with u now bc you’re apparently the hottest bodyguard they’ve ever seen? :p  _

_ U do look good though hyung lol  _

Jaebum isn’t sure he has an answer to that. People are going to talk, didn’t he say that himself?  _ Let people think what they want.  _ But now that he’s being faced with the reality of what people are thinking, is this really true? Or should Jaebum have Jinyoung strike it down as quickly as it came to avoid exposure? 

He groans in frustration and puts his head in his hands. God, this is so confusing. All five of them had been right, of course, Jackson especially: he is not who he thought he was, and if he could have ever even fathomed that it would end up like this, he never would have taken the job. 

There’s a clicking to his right as the car door is opened, pale yellow light casting shadows across Jinyoung’s face as he sticks his head inside the car and looks at him with concern. Jaebum jumps a little, startled, and picks up his phone when it falls to the floor before sliding it back into his pocket.

“Are you okay?” 

“Yes,” he lies, although he isn’t sure Jinyoung believes it, but he can’t really see his face to confirm it. “Is your shoot over?” 

“Yep,” Jinyoung nods and pulls himself up into the front seat of the massive rental car, closing the door behind him and plunging the cabin back into the milky darkness it had been before he arrived. Jaebum can feel him looking at the side of his face but he doesn’t look over, turning on the car instead and backing out. 

Their hotel isn’t very far, only about an hour or so, but because they are out in the countryside a little, the way to get there is barren and empty save for a peppering of houses off in the hills and small businesses long closed for the night. He sneaks a peek at Jinyoung after rounding a curve and is startled to see that Jinyoung is already looking at him with his head leaned against the window. 

“What?” Jaebum asks, turning his head away quickly. He feels the car shudder a little underneath his feet and his brow furrows, but it evens out and he keeps driving. 

“Nothing,” he replies quietly, sounding a bit tired himself. “I just want to look at you, that’s all.” 

Jaebum resists the urge to close his eyes in frustration. He doesn’t have anything to say to that, afraid that anything that leaves his mouth will be the opposite of what his brain is telling him to say, and it is a much safer bet to just pretend he hadn’t said anything at all. Though if he tried to say that the feeling of Jinyoung’s gaze on the side of his face and neck wasn’t igniting a low heat throughout his whole body he’d be a damn, dirty liar. 

A hush falls over them, then, which makes the groaning of the car that much more obvious when it shudders again, harder, and shakes under Jaebum’s hands. Jinyoung sits up off the window, eyebrows dipping in the middle as the car evens out for barely a second before shaking like the frame is going to explode apart. 

“Hyung,” he says, sounding scared. “What the hell is going on?”

Just as confused, he looks at the dash display, but it doesn’t tell him anything. All of the lights are operating like normal until the car jerks and shudders again; Jaebum grunts as he yanks the steering wheel hard back to the right to right the car and keep the shaking thing from sending them headfirst into the ditch on the opposite side of the road. His right arm shoots out across Jinyoung’s chest to keep him in the seat and he instinctively fists a hand in his sweater for good measure as the car hiccups and starts to die while he manhandles it to the side of the road. 

Once the car finally cuts out on them and completely shuts itself off, smoke coming out of the hood and oil leaked all over the road in a swerving arc, Jinyoung just blinks down at where Jaebum’s hand is still fisted in his sweater, fingers curled and pressed against his chest and the echoing beating of his heart. 

“How far are we from the hotel?” 

Thankfully, there’s service out here, so either way they can call a tow. Jaebum checks the GPS and sighs. “45 minutes.”

He barks a laugh. “We’ve really only been driving for twenty minutes?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” Jinyoung says flatly. “Shit.”

He sighs again, “yeah.”

“If you let go of my shirt, I’ll call Jae and see what he can do.”

Flushing in the dark and grateful that Jinyoung can’t see because of it, Jaebum pulls his hand away. “Sorry.” 

He can see the curve of Jinyoung’s smile as he pulls his hand back, but it drops quickly when his manager answers and complains loudly at him for waking him up.

“Excuse me, princess,” Jinyoung says in annoyance. “What are we supposed to do? Look up a tow truck. See if they’ll take us to the hotel.” he pauses, presumably as Jae does what he asks--it’s almost funny, seeing as Jae should be the one calling the shots, but it seems as though Jinyoung has yet another person bending to his will. As he quietly studies Jinyoung’s handsome profile he wonders if it’s just because of his personality, or something else. 

“What?” Jinyoung asks, pulling the phone away from his mouth. 

“Nothing,” he replies, the rest of it gone unsaid and yet somehow understood in a way that he did not want.  _ I just want to look at you, that’s all.  _

Jinyoung looks away and the happiness on his face is unmistakable for the split second it is there before Jae says something to ruin it. “No, what do you mean? You can’t be serious! You’re not worried about the money, are you? You know I’m rich, right?” Jaebum huffs a quiet laugh at this, even though Jinyoung seems unamused, dark eyebrows dipping. “Hyung, you can’t be serious. You’re going to make us stay at some shitty hotel in the middle of nowhere just because you’re too tired to get us a tow that will take us all the way to the one we have booked?” 

If Jae had a good answer for this, neither of them hear it, as Jinyoung hangs up angrily and drops his phone in his lap. He doesn’t look over as he says,

“Jae said there’s a towing company nearby who will come get us and take us to a hotel a couple miles up the road, and that we just have to stay there for tonight. He’ll get us a rental tomorrow to pick us up and take us straight back to the airport from there in the morning.”

It’s already almost two in the morning, so for this, Jaebum is grateful. After the weird, tense day they’ve been having, it will be a nice relief for them to have time to themselves in separate rooms. Jinyoung, however, seems miffed and upset about the disruption of their plans, and he thrusts himself out of the car to lean against the side of it. 

After a long moment of debate, Jaebum gets out to join him. They stand shoulder to shoulder and look out onto the low rolling hills across the empty road from them in silence until Jinyoung says,

“Did you know that there’s pictures of us online flooded with rumors that we’re dating?”

“Yes,” he says, but doesn’t elaborate. Jinyoung’s head turns toward him and he looks at him in surprise. 

“Really?”

“Why do you sound surprised? I know how to read.” 

“I didn’t know Megatron knew how to use the internet.”

“Ha, ha,” Jaebum says sarcastically. It feels too friendly so he shifts away from him a bit, heart beating uncomfortably, the two of them treading on an ice so thin Jaebum can feel the sloshing of a cold water under his feet. “I read the news. I saw it.”

“And what do you think of it, hyung?” Jinyoung asks, voice low, and it sounds dangerous. Challenging. Jaebum hates the way it makes his stomach feel, and he’ll be glad the night is over when the doors of their respective hotel rooms close between them.

He should say something dissenting. Anything to tell Jinyoung that it’s not okay, that he should tell people the truth, that he should dispel the rumors as quickly as possible. He should tell Jinyoung to make it stop. Anything to make this a clean break, because a break is coming, whether they like it or not.

This is what he should do. He steps away from the car as headlights round the corner, not daring to look back. He should say something awful but what he says instead, is,

“Let them think what they want.”

 

***

 

Once more standing shoulder to shoulder at the gaudy check out counter in an even gaudier, tiny lobby of a dinky hotel in the middle of nowhere at three o’clock in the morning, Jaebum resists the urge to move away as the both of them watch a flustered and tired receptionist dig through their files for empty rooms. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, once again looking at Jinyoung and not at Jaebum, reduced to a shadow in the presence of Korea’s sweetheart. “We hardly ever get visitors this late, and especially not famous ones like you, Mr. Park—“

He shushes her gently. He looks tired now, dark circles pressed underneath his eyes, steadfastly refusing to look at him even though Jaebum is sure Jinyoung knows that he’s looking. Everything in him tells him to turn away but there’s a part of him that thinks if he keeps looking at the side of his face, he’ll be able to say if the stress folded into the corners of his eyes is related to him or not. 

“It’s okay. They don’t have to be next to each other, just as long as you have two rooms.” Jaebum thinks he detects the smallest undercurrent of snark in the way that he says this, but he’s not sure. He’s tired, too, and maybe his brain and his heart have just decided to play tricks on him. 

Finally the receptionist pulls out a piece of paper, triumphantly holding it up next to the screen of an ancient computer monitor. She compares the list in her hand to something on it, probably a sign in sheet of sorts, clicking through menus on the giant keyboard on the desk in front of her. Slowly but surely her excitement fades until her face falls altogether and her cheeks pink with an embarrassment that has Jaebum’s stomach falling to the floor. 

“I’m sorry, Mr. Park, but it looks like we only have one room available right now.”

“Just one?”

Jinyoung’s voice is neutral and Jaebum’s hands turn to nervous fists in the pockets of his coat.  _ Please, anything but this.  _

“Unfortunately, sir.” 

_ Please have two beds. Please.  _

“Is there two beds?”

The receptionist swallows, looks away. Jaebum closes his eyes because he knows what that look means, and he prepares himself for whatever fight or encounter they’re going to have locked up in a tiny room with one bed until the morning comes. It already feels like the both of them are hanging on by a hair-thin thread. 

“Just one, sir,” her voice small and colored with chagrin. 

Jinyoung sighs. Jaebum opens his eyes just in time to see him lay his hand out palm up on the counter, face empty of anything, but it seems that his stress has maybe dissipated the smallest bit. He isn’t sure what that means and he isn’t sure that the swooping sensation in his stomach is good, either. 

“Give me the keys. We’ll take it.” 

  
  
  


The silence is tense and awkward to a point where it is almost tangible; Jinyoung waits on the sidewalk as Jaebum gets their overnight bags from the back of the car where it sits lonely and broken in the parking lot. The hotel is no bigger than Jinyoung’s house, instead stretched out in a one story line instead of multiple floors. It’s very homey, all pale yellow walls and white doors and tiny rooms. They pass the small cut out in the wall that boasts an ice machine and a soda cooler. The fluorescents that flicker as the ice machine hums while they pass loans to the tense atmosphere between them in a way that feels impossible to describe. 

They arrive at their room at the very end of the building. Jaebum’s stomach feels sloshy and turns over and over as Jinyoung glances at him before turning to unlock the door, but they’ve yet to speak to each other and the silence grows more and more oppressive with each moment of it that passes. Jinyoung steps in to turn the light on and the sight of the room bathed in a soft yellowish glow makes his stomach drop. 

The window is pretty big, and the walls are painted a nice green color like earth, but his main concern is the bed against the far wall with its floral sheets and tiny mattress. It’s no bigger than a full and Jaebum’s chest has started to squeeze with the anxiety of proximity. He’s already struggling with the idea of saving him, haunted by a love that would not disappear no matter how many shadowed years were lay upon it, and cornered by a desire he knows he should not feel but does, anyway.

Jinyoung just stands in the middle of the room and watches him quietly with dark eyes as he places their duffel bags in a chair by the door and turns to dig through it. He can sense that Jinyoung likely wants to say something, but he doesn’t; Jaebum is already hyper aware of his presence in the room and knows that in order to calm the tight squeezing of his chest, he just has to keep looking away.

When he finds his pajamas in his bag, he balls them up in a fist and yanks them out quickly. 

“I’m going to take a shower,” he says, feeling seasick at the idea of being naked just on the other side of the wall from Jinyoung. His traitorous mind starts to wander but he quickly forces it back and locks himself in the bathroom away from Jinyoung’s heavy gaze.

As he strips down out of his nice clothes and steps into the hot shower, he allows himself a moment to stand under the stream with his eyes closed and get his thoughts together. Water traces the lines in his face as he squeezes his eyes shut against anything that comes that has to do with Jinyoung. The heart inside his chest already so confused and aching beats harder as he replays every moment of their tension since the day he’d arrived: the jokes, the looks, escalated to the power play of sex, the evolution of their touches and glances and accidental brushings. He thinks of their encounter in the elevator and how badly in that moment he had wanted to shed his skin and become someone else, someone who could indulge in the taste of Jinyoung’s mouth and not string themselves up for it. 

_ Jesus, Jaebum,  _ he says to himself, scrubbing his face hard.  _ Get a grip.  _

But it’s so hard. It is  _ so hard.  _ It’s hard for him to feel composed, to feel normal and stable when everything about Jinyoung has thrown him for a loop since the moment they saw his picture in the folder. Everything has become so fucked up, so convoluted, a streaky watercolor left out in the rain. He is not who he thought he was and the facade has started to slip with each glance of Jinyoung’s eyes at anywhere other than his face. He again thinks of the wire between the trees that snaps with too much pressure. 

_ I don’t know who I am anymore.  _

Then:

_ Please don’t let me break. _

When he gets out of the shower, he only feels marginally better. He dries his hair and notices that Jinyoung has turned the main light off in the room, a strip of darkness tinged with amber underneath the bathroom door, and he can only hope that Jinyoung has already fallen asleep. He hopes for this even more when he pulls his sweatpants up low on his hips and realizes with a sudden plummeting of his heart that he forgot to bring a shirt.

If only he could be so lucky. 

When he steps out of the steamy bathroom and back into the cold air of the room, Jinyoung is laying neatly on one side of the bed in his own pajamas, a matching set of a navy silk long sleeved shirt and blue shorts that ride up dangerously high on his lean thighs when he spreads them just enough to make Jaebum look away. 

There’s a quiet rustling as Jinyoung sits up on an elbow as Jaebum stands by the bathroom door to dry his hair with the towel. He’s trying very hard to ignore the burning line that Jinyoung’s eyes are making down the front of his body, obviously staring, although he makes a conscious effort not to notice the way Jinyoung is practically drooling over his exposed stomach. Jaebum feels stupid in the weirdest way and considers running from the hotel room and all the way back home as Jinyoung’s dark eyes leave scorching trails on his chest and stomach.

Jaebum swallows. His stomach has hollowed out and warmth begins to form when he looks from beneath his hair at Jinyoung sprawled on the bed in his silky pajamas and having a staring contest with his navel.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” 

Jinyoung’s eyes flick up to his. He’s visible mostly in an outline: the main light in the room is off, the bedside lamp the only source of a gooey, amber hue that follows the curve of Jinyoung’s body in an ambience that Jaebum had not asked for. Most of his face is shadowed but Jaebum can see the pinpricks of light in his eyes as they trail up his chest and bore into his.

“Did you know, Sejin-ssi,” he begins, his voice a milky purr that sets the hair on his neck on end, “that you are a very handsome man?”

Handsome meaning something else in this context, of course, and if Jinyoung is trying to go for subtlety, then he should reconsider, as the timbre of his voice gives him away entirely. 

Jaebum licks his lips a bit and turns back toward the bathroom to toss the damp towel on the sink. “I guess. I don’t really think about it.”

“What about me?”

“What  _ about _ you?” he asks gruffly, avoiding his eyes as he comes over to the bed and stands near the empty side of it like he’s afraid. Jinyoung’s expression is clearer now that he’s closer, still painted in ambient amber hues, and it feels like a hot stab in the stomach. Jinyoung seems to notice that Jaebum has yet to move away and he stretches out along his side of the bed in just the perfect way to make the shorts ride up to the tops of his thighs. Jaebum watches this helplessly and grabs a pillow. No sense in pretending he hasn’t looked but he won’t acknowledge it. 

“Do you think about me?” he purrs. 

_ God, more than you know. _

He sighs. “Jinyoung, go to sleep.” Jaebum takes the pillow and plops it unceremoniously onto the green carpet by his side of the bed and closer to the window. “Let’s not do this. Just get some sleep and we’ll get a car tomorrow.” 

“What are you doing?” Jinyoung asks, the hint of a pout obvious in his voice as Jaebum starts to gather up a blanket in his hands. 

“I’m going to sleep on the floor.” 

“No,” Jinyoung says, sitting up and patting the empty space by him. “Sleep on the bed. It’s better for your back.”

“Jinyoung…”

“Don’t ‘Jinyoung’ me,” he huffs, still patting the empty side of the bed mere inches away from the lean, solid warmth of Jinyoung’s own body. “It’s just for the night. We’re leaving first thing in the morning anyway.”

He shouldn’t. He knows he shouldn’t. Jaebum is fully aware that he should ignore him and just sleep on the floor with as much space between their bodies as possible, but the empty spot calls to him, a lighthouse guiding the ship of his heart he’d lost at sea to a shoreline full of jagged rocks to crash and break against. Jaebum picks the pillow up off the floor and drops it back onto the bed, gesturing at the light behind Jinyoung as he rests his weight on one knee. 

“Turn the light off.” 

He does, turning the top half of his body to pull the tiny chain as Jaebum slips into the small bed next to Jinyoung and lays on his back with his eyes trained on the strip of light going across the ceiling from the gap in the curtains. If they’re careful and stay like this all night, they could maintain the three inches of space that exists between the curve of Jaebum’s shoulder and the tiny indent in Jinyoung’s lean chest. Even still he can feel the warmth of the other’s body like a furnace against the side of him and his nervous heart beats faster as the heat inside his belly threatens to grow. 

Minutes pass and it’s obvious by both of their slightly uneven breaths that neither of them are asleep. Jinyoung lays on his side facing him, dark eyes on the side of his face or his chest or his stomach where the tiniest bit of moonlight seeps in to color the dips and valleys of his muscle. Jinyoung shifts a bit, breathing out, the warmth of it against his cheek and neck while the other boy’s knee gently bumps his thigh. Jaebum swallows and feels every nerve in his body snap tight as a livewire that snaps and crackles with electricity. 

Jinyoung twitches, breathes. He whispers “hyung?” but it’s breathless and Jaebum’s teeth grind in the dark.

“Jinyoung,” he growls, low, a warning left unspoken but in the tone of his voice. 

“You’re so…” Jinyoung hesitates.  _ “Warm.”  _

It’s not what he’d been expecting and it makes him huff an unwarranted breathless laugh. He can still feel the subtle heat of Jinyoung’s body and he remains coiled tight like a spring even as he rubs one eye with his hand.

“Thanks?” 

“I’m cold,” he says. “Can I scoot closer?” 

Jinyoung sounds sincere enough; Jaebum lays his hand on his own stomach and turns his head to the side, immediately startled by the way Jinyoung’s eyes are huge and dark in the shadowed room. The light from outside reflects in the deep pools of them like tiny, swirling galaxies, and Jaebum can feel himself being pulled into the void of them. He swallows.

He should, of course, say no. It’s the worst idea in the world to allow Jinyoung this, to allow  _ himself  _ this, the intimacy of closeness. But the desire has already begun to bloom inside the empty shell of his body, unfurling slowly, each uneven intake of breath from inches away from his face audible in the silence. Jaebum’s heart pounds as Jinyoung’s eyes stay locked on him like the laser sight of an automatic weapon.

In direct opposition to both of their best interests, he nods. The movement is small and only occurs once, but it is enough for Jinyoung to see it. 

All of the air in the room vanishes in the vacuum of Jinyoung’s sharp intake of breath as he shifts, up on an elbow to move closer. Jaebum hears the noise he makes deep in his chest and the sound his skin makes when it slides along the sheets until he stops, dropping back down to his side and pillowing his face, still turned in his direction, on his folded hands. Every point of contact now burns like little wildfires: Jinyoung’s chest against his shoulder, his stomach near his ribs, thighs together and crotch against his hip just where the waistband of his sweatpants meets skin. Their breathing syncopates in deep, uneven rhythm as Jinyoung’s mouth is now mere inches away from his ear. 

“Hyung,” he murmurs after a long period of frustratingly tense silence. “What are you thinking about?”

“I’m thinking about how you should be asleep,” he replies, trying to sound casual or even reprimanding, but even to his own ears his voice is deep and strangled by desire. 

Jinyoung’s voice drops an octave, leaning closer so that the swell of his lips brushes the shell of his ear and raises goosebumps along every visible inch of him. Warmth pools in his groin and he squeezes his eyes closed against the way he feels himself about to get hard. 

“Is that  _ really  _ what you’re thinking about?” he asks quietly, but in that warm, honey purr that sharpens in Jaebum’s stomach like a knife. 

“Jinyoung,” he breathes, ragged, not so much a warning anymore but trying to be. 

“Just,” his breath hitches in Jaebum’s ear, lower lip catching a bit on his earlobe, and Jaebum’s whole body tenses like he’s preparing for a fall. His eyes stay squeezed shut against the dark even as he listens to Jinyoung shift the tiniest bit. “Can I just…”

His eyes spring open when he feels the feather light touch of Jinyoung’s fingertips on his stomach above his navel. Jaebum’s chest compresses, a sharp, accidental breath leaving him in an exhale and his stomach flexes under Jinyoung’s touch. He drags his fingers down, barely the caress of the pads of his fingers, but they leave lightening in their wake as Jinyoung passes over his navel and draws them back up. The younger man makes a noise in his throat as he drags them up Jaebum’s chest between his pecs, to his throat, tracing the nervous bobbing of his adam’s apple as he swallows back a whimper. His hand flattens to a palm as he wanders back down, fingers prodding, Jaebum’s whole body going up in flames as Jinyoung breathes heavily beside him and explores what’s visible of his body with a tender hand. 

“Jinyoung,” he pants, not sure what he’s trying to convey anymore, as every single thought in his head has vanished beneath the warmth of Jinyoung’s palm where it ventures toward his hip. 

“Let me touch,” Jinyoung begs, voice edging on a whimper. His tongue is warm when it brushes against Jaebum’s ear as he wets his lips and slides his hand lower, lower. Heat seeps through the thin material of his sweatpants as Jinyoung’s palm cups on his thigh, feeling it.

“Jinyoung, oh, Jinyoung––”

“Hyung––”

Jinyoung slides up the inside of his thigh and Jaebum groans in his chest as his legs spread underneath the touch. His dick is already half hard by the time Jinyoung reaches the top of his thigh, knuckles dangerously close, fingers prodding as he hesitates for only a moment before taking a shuddering breath and cupping Jaebum’s cock over his sweatpants.

Feeling explodes in his chest as Jinyoung gently starts to grope him, the blood in his head rushing down and back up in an unbridled riptide. The sudden flooding of pleasure in his groin has him gripping Jinyoung’s wrist hard and pushing it away: he yelps, surprised, going pliant as Jaebum shoves him backward and flips quickly to his knees to pin Jinyoung down to the bed with his body. Jinyoung makes a noise as Jaebum’s hips press against his, and through the thin material of Jinyoung’s shorts he can feel that he’s hard already. 

“You drive me crazy, you know that?” Jaebum grunts, squeezing both of Jinyoung’s wrists when he grabs the other one to pin both above his head so he can’t move. Sweat gathers at his damp hairline and sticks the long strands to his neck. “Why can’t you just keep your hands to yourself?” 

Jinyoung is a master player at this game, though, and Jaebum knows immediately that he’s lost. He shifts underneath the weight of Jaebum’s body in just the right way so that the hard lines of their cocks brush through the thin fabric of their clothes and asks,

“Do you want me to, hyung?”

He feels like he’s going crazy. Just the sound of Jinyoung’s rough, breathless voice gets him fully hard, and he hangs his head between his shoulders to look down at the strip of Jinyoung’s exposed stomach where his silky shirt has ridden up, flat and tanned and heaving as he breathes like a runner. 

“Hyung…” he whispers, and Jaebum looks back at him, all painted in greys and blacks in the dark of the room. “Will you touch me?” 

Fire erupts across his body as Jinyoung spreads his legs underneath him, drawing his body in closer, moaning when Jaebum grinds down against him and squeezes his wrists. Wild, unfiltered emotion pounds through his insides chased by the void of lust as Jinyoung shakes his hands free and leans up at the same time he leans down to kiss. Their lips meet open-mouthed, teeth clicking, tongues sliding wet and hot and open as Jinyoung slides a now free hand into the long, damp hair at the back of his neck. He rests his weight on an elbow, arching his back and fitting against the curve of Jaebum’s lean body like the puzzle piece he always knew that he was. 

They continue to kiss messily like inexperienced teenagers while all of the pent-up tension that has existed between them for years beyond their separation bleeds out into the atmosphere. Jaebum leans on one hand to run the other up Jinyoung’s shirt to his chest, the combined feeling of warm softness on his palm and the silk against his knuckles making his eyes roll back while Jinyoung just rolls his hips up against him. What constitutes as kissing is really just the two of them sharing air, panting into each other’s mouths and licking and biting at their lips while their hands wander on the length of each other’s bodies. Jinyoung starts to slide his free hand down Jaebum’s chest and he grabs it by the wrist to guide it to his cock, hard and tenting the black fabric of his sweatpants. 

“Hyung,” Jinyoung moans, taking the hint and grabbing Jaebum’s cock over his sweats and massaging it. Jaebum rolls his eyes back and shudders full bodied while Jinyoung rubs him off. “Fuck, hyung––”

“You drive me crazy,” he pants again, pushing Jinyoung’s hand down harder against his dick by the wrist, moaning into his mouth as pleasure floods his groin. “Drove me crazy since the first day––”

“You drive  _ me  _ crazy,” Jinyoung half laughs and half whimpers, pulling his hand away from Jaebum’s cock to grip his shoulder as he shifts and gets his legs up and over his hips. He locks his ankles in Jaebum’s lower back and whines when he shifts on his knees to thrust against him. “So hot and cold all the time, acting like you like me, then acting like you hate me the next, god, so confusing––oh, fuck, hyung––”

They lapse into the silence punctuated by heavy breathing and moaning as Jaebum moves his mouth down to Jinyoung’s jaw, kissing and sucking a spot on his neck that makes his hips jerk up hard while they rut against each other roughly. The material of Jinyoung’s silk shorts is so thin that he can feel the curve of Jinyoung’s ass perfectly on the shaft of his cock, and it drags a ragged, broken noise out of his chest and against the skin of Jinyoung’s neck. 

Jinyoung’s hand moves from his shoulder down to his crotch again, groping him a little before he dips his fingers in the waistband of his sweats and briefs at the same time and tries to shove them down. Jaebum groans and sits up on his knees, intending to help, but Jinyoung just moves with him: Jaebum cradles Jinyoung’s head between his palms as he sits up, shirt askew and stuck to him with sweat while he holds Jaebum’s hips and admires the length of his body. 

“You’re so good-looking, hyung,” he moans, one hand on his stomach and tracing the tiny, puckered scars in various places on his body. His heart suddenly stops, wondering if Jinyoung had seen the one on his chest, but his fingers are tracing the tail of the tattoo on his back that wraps to his ribs and staring at the tented front of his sweats. “God, so hot––”

All at once, Jinyoung grabs the waistband of his sweats and his underwear and yanks it down hard to the tops of his thighs. Both of them gasp as his cock comes free, heavy and aching to be touched, but Jinyoung just drags his fingers down, following the line of dark hair from his navel to the base of his cock, but not touching. Instead, he grips Jaebum’s hip with one hand and uses the other to hurriedly undo the buttons on his silk shirt and lets it fall open. 

“I want you so bad,” he moans, grabbing the back of Jaebum’s neck and pulling him back down on top of him, head of his cock sliding along the silk of his shorts and the skin of his stomach. “Please, I need it––”

“Do you have anything?” Jaebum pants, so turned on he can barely breathe, biting his lip as he leans on one hand and uses the other to pull Jinyoung’s shorts down and to his knees. He shifts to kick them off and then wraps his legs back around Jaebum’s hips, angled up so that he can reach down between them. 

“Fuck, no, I don’t,” Jinyoung whines, but that doesn’t stop him from quickly licking his palm and reaching down to wrap his long fingers around both of their cocks at the same time. Jaebum’s balls draw up and he moans from low in his chest at the sensation that has him rocking his hips down.

“Then just––”

“Just––” Jinyoung moans as he lets go, readjusting so that he’s higher up on the bed and angled in Jaebum’s lap; Jaebum watches in lust-soaked awe as Jinyoung pushes his thighs together and guides Jaebum’s cock between them with a steady hand. “Just fuck me like this, then,” he says, and Jaebum does.

He gets both hands down on the bed over Jinyoung’s shoulders, their sloppy, open-mouthed kissing resuming as Jaebum slowly starts to rock his hips, cock sliding between Jinyoung’s toned thighs. Jinyoung moans and wraps his fingers around his own cock, jerking slow, panting into Jaebum’s open mouth as he drags his fingertips through the precome at his tip and slicks up the space between his legs with it. Jaebum shudders and moans at the wet, silky warmth, wanting so much to be inside of him completely; if they’ve already arrived at this bridge and burned it, then Jaebum wants more, more, more. But this, too, is good enough, the feeling of his cock sliding between the tight spot of Jinyoung’s thighs, listening to the man underneath him whimper and moan for him, jerking himself off to the feeling of Jaebum-not-Jaebum and imagining that inside of him, most likely. Something like desire burned at the edges with guilt and heartache opens up in his stomach and chest at the fact that Sejin gets to have this, but not himself. It makes him feel a little heartsick and his hips falter a little in rhythm.

“C’mon, Sejin-ssi,” Jinyoung pants, and the fake name falling from Jinyoung’s mouth like this makes his stomach drop. He leans up and places a hand over Jinyoung’s mouth, too afraid that he would reveal himself if he heard it again. Jinyoung grins at him from behind his hand and jerks faster, moaning, soft lips moving against his fingers and palm as Jaebum’s hips pick back up in their rhythm until he has to move his hand away again to hold himself up.

“Yeah, like that,” he moans, squeezing his thighs tighter, dragging a slew of curses out of Jaebum as he fucks between them faster. “Yeah, c’mon, fuck, does it feel good? I’m so close, hyung, I’m so close––”

“I wanna watch,” he says, voice ragged, hanging his head between his shoulders and groaning at the sight of his cock where it slides wetly between Jinyoung’s thighs. He listens to Jinyoung’s breathing pick up, moaning with every thrust of Jaebum’s hips, rocking against him and his fingers twitching as he roughly jerks himself off underneath him. Jaebum watches as Jinyoung’s flat stomach tenses, breath caught, fingers gripped as he moans on an exhale and comes across his belly. Even just the sight of it is enough to do him in: Jaebum fists the sheets in his hands and grunts as Jinyoung squeezes his thighs impossibly tighter for him, so slick with saliva and both of their precome that he nearly pulls all the way out. When he thrusts in again, sweat dripping down his neck and chest, Jinyoung pulls at the hair on the base of his neck and pulls hard, jerking his neck up as he watches himself come hard across the flat plane of Jinyoung’s wet stomach.

He sighs, rocking a little bit, wetting his lips with a nervous tongue as he sits up on his knees between Jinyoung’s thighs and looks down at him. There’s an unreadable expression on his face, but it looks satisfied, too, and Jaebum will just have to take that for what it is. Without saying anything he slips backward off the bed and grabs a damp towel from the bathroom, coming back and wiping himself off before pulling his sweatpants back up over his hips. 

“Hyung…” Jinyoung murmurs, but it doesn’t go anywhere, so Jaebum doesn’t answer him. He climbs back on the bed with Jinyoung’s silky shorts in one hand, kneeling between his open knees and gently cleaning off his stomach without being asked. Jinyoung’s eyes close in pleasure and the moment is oddly sweet, tasting bitterly intimate in his mouth. 

Once Jinyoung is cleaned up, he allows Jaebum to grip his ankles one by one and guide both of his feet into the legs of his shorts, lifting his body as Jaebum pulls them up to his hips and then lets his hands rest there. He can feel Jinyoung’s heavy gaze on him, questioning but not, reveling in a new-found softness from someone he had only thought to be cut from the hardest diamond. Jaebum, already feeling the regret and the inward anger at what he’d selfishly allowed himself to be part of, just blinks and runs his hands up the bare skin of Jinyoung’s waist, palms pressed to the curve.

Jinyoung wraps a gentle hand around one of his wrists to get his attention. “Sejin.” 

“What?” 

“Are you okay?” 

He wants to laugh. And cry. Maybe both. Instead he just nods, not sure whether or not to flash a smile even if its fake. “Are you?” 

“Yes,” he says, and he  _ does _ smile, and Jaebum’s heart breaks when he sees it’s genuine. “Let’s go to sleep.”

Even though he shouldn’t, he allows himself to be pulled down to the bed and turned to his back. He allows himself to be positioned, one arm stretched out and cradling Jinyoung’s neck where his head settles on Jaebum’s shoulder. A heaviness settles on his chest like a thousand pound stone as Jinyoung curls against him, so soft and beautiful and gentle and the total opposite of everything he had made him to be in his heart. It hurts even worse when their legs tangle and Jaebum curls his arm to cradle Jinyoung’s head, fingers brushing away the hair at his temple. 

Jinyoung falls asleep quickly, no doubt feeling comforted and safe in his arms. Guilt holds Jaebum down by the throat knowing that, at some point, it will be betrayed. Be it by gunfire or something else, Jaebum will betray him, and as Jinyoung sleeps peacefully against the line of his body, it feels like a fate much worse than death. 

 


	11. 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> but you, amplified in the silence  
> justified in the way you make me bruise 
> 
> [ *** ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VISJzFME8ns)

 

The next morning, awareness comes in waves. First it is the ending of a good dream, for once, no blood or mayhem splashed across his watery vision. Then it’s the light from the window, then the warmth of a body at his side, their skin sticky with trapped heat. Jaebum blinks into the soft, grey light of a morning after and takes his first deep breath in a long, long time. 

They can do this, right?

He turns his head a little to the left, looking at where Jinyoung is flat on his back, still deeply asleep with one arm thrown across his chest and the other tucked behind his head. The line of his shirtless body is pressed against the length of Jaebum’s where he’s also on his back, the two of them side by side taking up most of the bed, and Jaebum’s heart sputters uncomfortably at how  _ peaceful  _ Jinyoung looks. The gentleness of the light seeping in through the curtains both on the back wall and the one by the door, while not much, is enough to throw spidery shadows across the tops of his cheeks from where his eyelashes rest. His lips, lips that Jaebum has kissed for the second time in his life (and this alone is enough to make his stomach hollow out and cramp with anxiety), soft and plump and dry, parted just enough to see the bottom of his teeth.

In any other lifetime, he thinks, he could stay here all day and watch him until he wakes, waiting patiently with quiet breath for the moment that his breathing changes and his soft eyes open, heavy with sleep and dark, dark, dark. He could hold him, touch him, bury his face in his warm neck for comfort, anything. Anything. In any other life he could lie here and kiss him awake.

But not in this one. 

Frustrated and uncomfortable, Jaebum throws himself out of bed and away from the tempting heat of Jinyoung’s body. He roughly grabs his duffle bag and takes it into the bathroom, trying not to slam the door and doing it anyway, jerking the sink handle so hard it hurts his hand. Noise from beyond the door makes him aware of the fact that he must have woken Jinyoung up but he was going to have to do it, anyway. He tries not to think about what happened the night before and scrubs his face hard with tepid sink water before patting it dry with a hand towel and pressing it so hard against his eyes that colored fireworks bloom on the black. 

_ You never covered your moles,  _ he reminds himself, a sudden shockwave of cold like ice water down his back that makes him drop the towel from his face. With a hurried hand he digs through the small amount of things he’d brought with him for the expected overnight, relieved when he sees the tiny bag containing the things he needs to cover it, but feeling a growing sense of dread that he could have been so careless last night. The room was dark, sure, and Jinyoung hadn’t said anything about it; he seemed not to notice, even moaning  _ Sejin  _ in the throes of what they did, but could he have been acting? He squeezes his eyes shut.

_ Careful,  _ a phantom voice tells him, crouched down beside him in the wet leaves of a shadowy wood between two trees,  _ too much pressure and it snaps.  _

_ Have I not broken already? _

Whatever. If either of them are going to make it out of this alive, he has to start thinking, and he has to start thinking  _ fast.  _ Done covering up the evidence of himself, he throws the tiny travel bag back into the bottom of his duffel bag and searches for clothes. Jaebum is pulling the black slacks he’d brought from it where it’s propped on the counter when the bathroom door opens and hits him in the back. 

He grunts and stumbles forward a little, teeth grinding when Jinyoung makes a soft noise of surprise and then laughs as he comes in and closes it behind him. Already not a large hotel room in itself, the bathroom is even smaller, and he finds himself pinned to the sink when Jinyoung takes a half-step closer to wrap his arms around Jaebum’s neck.

“Hi,” he says, blinking, obviously still sleepy. Jaebum sighs and wants to push him away, but there’s a part of himself that’s already broken, and so he puts his hands on Jinyoung’s warm, bare waist. 

“Good morning,” he mumbles, not sure what exactly it conveys, but Jinyoung doesn’t seem to mind: he closes his eyes again and pulls away just enough to run both of his hands through the long, silky hair at Jaebum’s neck. It draws up goosebumps on his skin in all directions and his fingers tighten on Jinyoung’s hips. 

“Y’r hair’s so soft,” Jinyoung mutters to him, leaning forward to rest his chin on Jaebum’s shoulder and lean his head against Jaebum’s jaw. “And you’re still s’warm.” 

He chuckles but it hurts. “Thanks.” 

Jinyoung takes a deep breath through his nose and leans back to stretch, up on his tip toes and letting his body arch against Jaebum’s while he yawns and throws his hands up over his head. He should look away, he knows, but shut up in the bathroom of a tiny, nowhere hotel, they’ve seemed to stop time and he revels in it for just a moment. Jinyoung just smiles as Jaebum slides his hands up the line of his hips to his waist to underneath his ribs and admires the tanned skin marked only occasionally with scars he knows well stretched over lean muscle. 

“You like what you see?” Jinyoung teases, putting his elbows on Jaebum’s shoulders and moving closer. His breath shortens in his chest as Jinyoung starts to play with his hair and angle his head like he’s going in for a kiss. 

“Yes,” Jaebum replies honestly, and Jinyoung pushes his lips together to chuckle. The sight of the lines radiating from his eyes when he does it matches the fracture lines in his heart and he wishes they’d go away.

“But we have to get dressed and go,” he finishes, sliding his hands back down and gently moving him away. Jinyoung pouts as Jaebum turns away from him to grab his duffel bag off the counter but doesn’t protest when he’s ushered out of the bathroom and back into the room to dress. 

Quietly they separate to dig through their bags and dress; it’s not awkward, not quite, and Jaebum thinks that most of the unrest he can feel in the airwaves is coming only from him and on a frequency that Jinyoung isn’t picking up on. There’s nothing but the sound of their breathing for a while, but––there. Jaebum stops buckling his belt and looks up toward the window with a frown. 

Jinyoung seems to have heard it, too: he turns toward Jaebum with his pink sweater pulled down over tight black jeans and cocks his head. “Does that sound like people walking in the gravel to you?” 

Jaebum, still shirtless, abandons his duffel and walks quietly to the window. The sound grows louder and more obvious, overlapping footsteps in the rocks outside the hotel room not like one person walking, but  _ multiple.  _ Dread spills in his stomach as he listens closer and hears the tell-tale camera shutters and hush-hush whispering of paparazzi.

_ Could this get any worse?  _ He asks himself, stepping to the side of the window by the door, careful not to disturb the curtain in the middle lest the zoo outside is waiting for it. Instead he slides a finger behind the material and pulls it away just enough to peek outside and confirm that, yes, there’s a swarm of paparazzi outside just on the edge of the sidewalk and waiting for Jinyoung’s exit. 

“We have a problem,” Jaebum says, letting the curtain fall back against the wall. He hears the cameras clicking and the murmur grow louder so they must have seen it and he tries to not roll his eyes. 

Jinyoung, sitting on the bed, chews his lip but otherwise looks unworried. “The car is going to be here in like, fifteen minutes.”

They just look at each other, then, room filled with the murmurs from outside. He should say something to break the silence: in any other situation he would have a plan, especially if the boys were involved, immediately breaking things down to give them the easiest out with minimal damage. But as he stands by the door and looks at Park Jinyoung who looks back at him with no idea who he really is, he thinks that he could never have planned for this in a thousand lifetimes.

“Come here,” Jinyoung says, softly, after a long moment of silence. 

He shouldn’t. Jaebum should put his shirt on and pull on his coat and prepare Jinyoung for the madness that will ensue from the doorway to the car when they reach it. But he doesn’t. 

He quietly steps forward, closer, eventually stopping at Jinyoung’s knees, looking down as Jinyoung looks up. The shorter pieces of hair that frame Jaebum’s face fall out where he’d had them pushed behind his ears, curled like dark parentheses around his temples and cheekbones. His breath is steady until Jinyoung wets his lips and puts one hand on his belt. 

“Jinyoung,” he warns, but halfheartedly. Every piece of him knows that once they leave this room, reality is going to slam back in like a speeding train with no way to stop it. Every moment, every touch, every second of their time in this room is a crucial tick mark in the skin that draws blood.  

“We have time,” Jinyoung murmurs, tugging lightly, urging Jaebum down on top of him. He lets himself be pulled, resting his weight on a knee between his thighs and his hands on the sides of his neck. “Just be with me.” 

“I’m with you,” he says breathlessly, hiccuping when Jinyoung runs a hand down his bare chest to his stomach, the other in his hair at the back of his neck. Goosebumps erupt once more on his arms and legs as Jinyoung’s fingertips dip into the soft waistband of his slacks and tug him closer as his body arches up and his head tips back on the bed. “Jinyoung––”

“Hyung,” he gasps, fingers tightening in his hair, their eye contact hot and intense as Jinyoung arches against him. “Kiss me––”

With a growl, Jaebum disentangles himself from Jinyoung’s grip, heart pounding like a jackhammer in his chest. Jinyoung makes a noise of frustration and drops flat on the bed to cross his arms over his chest and pout while Jaebum rakes a hand through his long hair and breathes out hard. 

“Not right now,” Jaebum says, and Jinyoung refuses to look at him. Childish, but in character. “There’s a ton of paparazzi out there waiting, and the car is going to be here in, what, ten minutes now? We don’t––we don’t have time.” 

He laughs and sits up. “You think I couldn’t make you come in under ten minutes?” 

Jaebum, who hadn’t been expecting that in any capacity, breaks character and blanches outright. He can feel the warmth of hot, embarrassed blood rushing into his face up his neck to where it burns at the tops of his ears. He looks away quickly and busies himself with looking for his shirt.

“Jesus, Jinyoung.”

He laughs. “You’re so cute when you’re embarrassed, Sejin hyung.”

Jaebum swallows, still blushing. “Shut up.”

Clearly delighted by this reaction, Jinyoung giggles and throws himself back on the bed, phone in his hand to pass the last of their time while Jaebum finishes getting dressed and tidying up the room. It’s not very disturbed, to say the least, although he does feel a little guilty and embarrassed about the towel they used, but other than that it’s just a way to keep his hands busy until the tires of the rental car Jae had sent crunches across the gravel in the parking lot outside. Jaebum grabs both of their bags, handing Jinyoung a mask and his sunglasses.

“I don’t care if they see us, hyung,” Jinyoung says, but he pulls the mask up over his nose and mouth anyway, sunglasses sitting at the tip of his nose. He watches quietly as Jaebum slips on his own and pops the collar of his overcoat and lets loose strands of hair fall around his face to hide it.

“I know.”

“But you do, don’t you?”

Jaebum’s hand is resting on his lower back, the other wrapped around the door handle about to throw it open. There’s an innocence in Jinyoung’s face, once he recognizes as the ghost of what he’d seen so long ago, and the still moment hung between them offers a sense of poignance he hadn’t considered possible, and it terrifies him to lose it. 

“I don’t know,” he says honestly, breaking it. Jinyoung just nods and takes a deep breath, eyes already squinted against the cameras that flash as soon as Jaebum turns the knob.

  
  
  


All in all, it’s not as painful as the airport, since the crowd is smaller, yet the implications are much worse: questions are flung at them both from all sides, Jaebum no longer just the shadow of Korea’s sweetheart but a player in the game, suddenly visible now amongst the rumors that swarm them like a plague. 

_ Jinyoung! Jinyoung! Are you and your bodyguard officially dating?  _

__ Yoo Sejin! Sejin, sir, over here! What can you say about the implications of spending the night together in a hotel room?   
_   
_ __ Sejin––Sejin! The people want to know, did you and Park Jinyoung sleep together last night? 

Had he been working for anyone else, he would have been worried about legal repercussions, but seeing as he’s technically self employed and working for Jinyoung, Jaebum has no qualms about jerking forward and shoving the recorder out of the paparazzi’s hand. Jinyoung just fists a hand in his shirt and yanks him forward and into the open back door of the car before it gets any worse. 

“You didn’t need to do that,” Jinyoung says, but his lips are curled so Jaebum suspects that he enjoyed it. “But, it was pretty badass.” 

Jaebum snorts. “Just doing my job.”

Jinyoung nods at this, choosing not to respond to instead lean forward and have the driver roll up the partition. Jaebum watches the glass roll up between them in an impressed sort of awe until he feels a slender hand sliding across his chest.

“What are you doing?” he asks, surprised, thinking that Jinyoung must be absolutely insane if he thinks Jaebum-not-Jaebum would engage in any sexual activity here. But Jinyoung just hums and lets his hand come to rest over Jaebum’s heart. 

For a moment neither of them move. Time holds its breath as Jaebum watches Jinyoung watch his hand where it remains flat against his broad chest over a heart that’s broken and bruised but still beats harder at the warmth. Jinyoung smiles after a while and says,

“You really don’t like crowds.” 

“What do you mean?”

Jinyoung nods at the place where his slender fingers lay over his heart like a weaponized shield and he smiles. “Your heart is always beating so hard around them.”

“Oh,” he says. He thought Jinyoung was going to say  _ your heart is always beating so hard around me  _ and his only answer would have been  _ that’s true.   _

The pain is instant and almost unbearable. He looks at Jinyoung’s hand placed so delicately over his heart and wonders if a stab wound would hurt less; breath bricks in his lungs at the tenderness of a touch he has never deserved, not even for a moment, not even in their former lives. If Jaebum had been alone in this moment he thinks that maybe he could have cried. 

Instead, he wraps his fingers tightly around Jinyoung’s wrist. He intends to pull it away and return it to his lap, but the idea that the severance of their physical contact is a mirrored severance in their heartlines makes the pain flare so brightly in his chest that he draws an audibly ragged breath. Jinyoung’s eyebrows furrow in concern, but Jaebum manages to speak first, 

“Jinyoung—“

“Oh,” he says, a little too loudly, pulling his hand quickly from Jaebum’s grip and dropping it in his lap. The tenderness has faded and been replaced with a waxy brightness that means his feelings are hurt. It drives the knife deeper down instead his hollow chest. Jinyoung says, “I know what  _ that  _ means.” 

“No you don’t,” he says softly, but looks at his hands, empty now, shadowed with the memory of blood. “All I said was your name.”

“You have a funny way of saying it.” Jinyoung doesn’t elaborate right away, turning his head to look out the window at the roads that pass by at warp speed. Finally, he says, “You say it like it’s bad news.”

_ You’re the worst news I’ve ever gotten. _

“I don’t mean to. It’s just that, Jinyoung, you have to understand—“ 

Jinyoung interrupts him without turning around. “That this is your job, and it was a mistake, and that we shouldn’t have done it. You're gonna tell me that we should forget about it and move on, you were caught up in the moment. You’re going to tell me it was wrong, right? That’s what you were going to say.” 

_ I was going to tell you who I am because I can’t take the pain of you not knowing. _

“In a way, yes,” Jaebum replies, choosing his words as wisely as he can, picking his next move carefully like walking through a minefield. “But.. I was going to say, Jinyoung, we have to be  _ careful.” _

Jinyoung seems to perk up at this, turning now, eyebrows raised over his sunglasses. “What do you mean?”

_ I’m reneging on a promise for you. I’m breaking a 6 billion dollar deal for you. One of us may have to die for it and I swear, Jinyoung, it won’t be you. _

But he doesn’t say this. As much as he wants to explain it all to him, spill his guts like a dog run over in the road, he can’t. The words stick in his throat and it terrifies him like it never has before that he cannot think of what to do next.

“Hyung?”

“I mean…” he takes a deep breath, eyes back on his hands. He needs to talk to the guys, privately, and his mind starts to whir. “We just have to be careful. This is bad enough as it is. I don’t want more rumors. Don’t touch me any more than you usually do in public. Don’t try to kiss me, don’t make jokes, don’t say or do anything that could confirm their suspicions. Do you understand?”

He sees Jinyoung nod out of the corner of his eye. A beat of tense silence passes before Jinyoung asks,

“What does it mean for us in private?” 

_ It means I’m going to die if you touch me, and I’m going to let you do it.  _

He swallows. “It doesn’t apply in private.”

“So I can kiss you when we’re alone?”

Jaebum looks up, Jinyoung already looking at him, and his stomach drops. Sunlight outlines the messiness of his wavy hair, split down the middle in a professionally handsome line, warming his tanned skin to a glow that makes Jaebum’s heart ache with memories of seeing it for months in the summer when they were still teenagers; lean bodies and not yet the canvas of scars they’d become, Jaebum more so than Jinyoung, but he has his, too. He has grown into the ears that had been the focal point of their jokes as they grew, and his pursed lips have yet to change, though his smiles are sharper now, more cunning than they’d been. Jinyoung is twice the man that Jaebum has ever expected him to become and it aches like growing pains. 

“Yes.” 

It should not make either of them happy. It should make them afraid; Jaebum has finally stepped on the landmine and one tiny, unaccounted for movement could blow them both to pieces. It’s hard to consider it a game when only one person knows they’re playing.

Jinyoung smiles. “Good.” 

  
  


 

It’s completely the opposite of  _ good  _ but since Jinyoung doesn’t know and can’t know the depth of the situation ( _ yet,  _ he reminds himself, because he will have to tell Jinyoung the truth eventually, and that’s not yet a beast he is ready to approach) he doesn’t correct him. Instead, they sit next to each other in a comfortable silence, making their way back to Seoul so that Jaebum can whisk Jinyoung off to his next schedule. 

Normally, Jaebum would wait in the car, passing time on his phone while the security inside the building kept an eye on him, not trusting anyone else to transport him. But as they get closer to the venue after hours or traveling, Jaebum takes a deep breath and lays a hand on Jinyoung’s leg where he’s sitting quietly in the passenger seat. 

“Jinyoung.”

“Hmm?”

“I have a favor to ask you.”

Jinyoung laughs. He sits up in his seat and pushes the sunglasses up his nose, exposing a bit of the dark circles pressed under his eyes. “You? Asking me for a favor? You’re like a whole new person.”

“Ha,” Jaebum says sarcastically, but it’s half-hearted. He’s been thinking of a way to bring this up since they were on the plane back this morning, and yet nothing he came up with sounded good or reasonable. His stomach churns nervously as he squeezes his thigh. “I’m serious.”

“Okay. What is it?” 

“I need to… I have an errand to run. I need to leave you with the studio security. But,” he says quickly, noticing Jinyoung’s eyebrows furrowing, “it’ll only be for a little while. In fact, I’ll be done before your shoot and interview are even over. It’s just—I can’t put it off anymore. And—“

“Hyung,” Jinyoung interrupts, laying his own hand on Jaebum’s thigh, massaging it a little when he can feel how tense it is as Jaebum’s whole body is wound tight like a spring. “You don’t need to ask me to do things. You know that, right?”

At a red light, Jaebum laughs a little nervously and runs a shaky hand through his hair. Every nerve ending in his body burns, almost in disbelief that he’s going to do what he is preparing to do. Everything in him screams to go back, every reflex aching, but he fights against the person he has conditioned himself to be and struggles through the words. 

“Yes, I do. My job is to protect you, and to be with you always.”

Neither of them say anything; the timbre of his voice offers something different than the obvious, the excuses he’s been giving since day one.

“You can go do this one thing, hyung. I don’t mind.” Jinyoung pauses for a moment, hand sliding higher up his thigh, but not in an attempt to engage him sexually, just for comfort. The light turns green and Jinyoung looks out the windshield. “Is everything okay? You seem scared.”

He’s never been more afraid of anything in his life, and with the life that he has lived, that is the scariest thing of all. 

“No,” he says honestly. “And that’s because I am.” 

“Jesus,” Jinyoung says, and though Jaebum doesn’t look over, he can tell that he blanches a little. “You’re admitting that you’re scared? Now you’re freaking  _ me  _ out. Hyung, what could you possibly be afraid of?”

At any time in his life before Jinyoung came back into it this way, he would have had one thing to say, and it would be said with all the conviction of a god: nothing. He was afraid of nothing. 

Jaebum bites his bottom lip and doesn’t answer. 

For once, it is  _ everything.  _

 

*** 

 

He stands on a familiar doorstep, unsure if he should ring the bell or just go in. He had long dropped Jinyoung off at the studio for his shoot and threatened the guards present with  _ let anything happen to him and you’ll only wish to get the same punishment.  _ They’d looked surprised and a little afraid, so Jaebum thinks he got his point across. 

He looks back at the car on the curb and then at the door. Apprehension settles on his shoulders and cold dread fills the empty, echoing cavern of his chest when his fingers touch the freezing buttons of the keypad. Despite the cold, nervous sweat drips down his neck. 

Jaebum swallows and presses the numbers in to unlock the door to the front walkway. 

It’s now or never. 

When the latch catches behind him and locks him into the small area of their front yard, he looks up to the patio and hopes that none of them are standing there: it’s unlikely that they don’t know he has arrived. Youngjae’s room with his fancy computer set ups also house their security camera monitors, and he has always been quick to note when people linger suspiciously outside. He leans back against the door, thankfully relieved of the potential peanut gallery, and tries to find his footing again as he feels it slip just the tiniest fraction. 

Jaebum isn’t sure if they’re home; none of them have vehicles that could give him an answer without walking in, so he’s taking it on good faith and divine intervention that at least three of the five are there; any less than that he’d have to do this over and over, which is the complete opposite of what he wants to do. Every moment spent explaining the spider’s web he’s curled himself into is a second wasted, and right now, time is something that they have so, so little of. If he intends to seek their help then he better get to it. 

Chewing his lip, Jaebum walks up the pathway and punches in a second code in the keypad by the door before pushing it open and starting upstairs to the main floor. Even in the stairwell he can hear the sound of them all: Youngjae and Yugyeom are yelling at each other over the constant barrage of too-loud video game noises while Bambam laughs on. Just faintly he can hear Mark and Jackson having a faint argument about something trivial, he’s not sure what. He misses the times where it would wash him in a sense of relief, of calm; his heart aches at the thought that he’s no longer happy to see them but afraid of them, and he hates himself so wholly for allowing it to change. 

The pneumatic door closes behind him when he’s halfway up the stairs. Where his footsteps are not very audible, the door is, and a lot of shushing goes on when the game is paused and the living room falls into a hush. Part of Jaebum wants to wait until they call out to him, too afraid of their reaction and wanting to feel wanted and not scorned, but he just mentally chastises himself for being a coward in his own home and keeps heading up the stairs to the landing. 

Five pairs of stares are waiting for him when he arrives, stepping onto the hardwood floor and putting his hands in his coat pockets. Jaebum tries to give off his typical air of cold nonchalance and wonders if it’s working: Youngjae and Yugyeom have matching gapes of surprise, mouths in twin  _ O _ s. Mark and Bambam look confused while Jackson just looks angry. Their youngest twitches like he’s going to throw himself off the couch and charge at him with a hug, but it seems the sense atmosphere of tension keeps them all rooted in place. 

“Hello,” he says, and clears his throat afterward in an attempt to cover the way his voice cracks. 

Youngjae is the first to say anything directed at him. Two words, “Did you—“ followed by a choked off silence and the heaviness of what he left them all to do hangs, left unsaid but implied. 

_ Did you kill him? _

Mark’s phone is in his hand, and he looks down at it to type, likely checking the news to confirm it. Jaebum realizes that the longer he stands here and says nothing in the wake of an unanswered question, the more they’re going to assume that he had, but he finds that the words to dissent are caught in his throat like pieces of glass.

“There’s nothing online,” Mark murmurs, mostly to the other four but now that the game is paused, the house is deadly quiet, and Jaebum hears it too. “So—“

Finally,  _ finally,  _ the words unstick. Jaebum’s throat still clicks with a dry swallow but the words come:

“I didn’t kill him.” 

Jackson, standing behind the couch between Youngjae and Yugyeom, digs his fingers into the material and stares him down. “Then why are you here?”

“Because,” he says, “I need your help.” 

“Our  _ help?”  _ Yugyeom blanches, dropping his controller. “Hyung, you really think we’d help you with this?”

“That’s not—“

Bambam interrupts next, “is this because of those rumors I told you about? Are you trying to get rid of him faster because of it?” 

He tries, “No, just—“

“Hyung,” Youngjae says, looking pale. “You don’t really think we’d help you do it when we told you not to take it in the first place—“

Jaebum’s nerves snap like a wire. He pulls his hands out of his pockets to run them both through his hair and make a low noise of frustration in his throat that turns into an abrupt shout, “No! God, would you just  _ listen  _ to me for a second?” 

After his outburst, there is only silence. His brain snickers at him and thinks,  _ just like old times.  _

He sighs, hands shaking as he tries to regain his composure; he stuffs them back into his pockets to hide the tremor as he walks over and sits on the edge of the chair by the couch that’s currently unoccupied. All sets of eyes swivel with his movement, quiet, like they’re in disbelief that he’d have the audacity to walk in here and sit down with them like this. Maybe they’re right. 

But he has to try. 

“I’m here,” he begins, hands hanging between his knees, palm up so he can stare at the mapped out lines of design, “because I  _ do _ need your help.” 

He pauses for a moment. Not for dramatic effect, but it seems that way as he tries to gather his thoughts and takes a deep breath.

“We’re in trouble. Potentially very  _ big _ trouble.”

“What do you mean?” Mark asks, sensible, while Jackson audibly groans  _ Hyung what the hell did you do?  _

“It’s not about what I did,” he says, addressing Jackson directly, knowing in his heart that Jackson will always, always be the hardest person to get back on his side when he makes a mistake, because Jackson values honesty and loyalty over everything and Jaebum has so easily broken both of those things between them like wet twigs. “It’s about what I’m going to do.”

Yugyeom looks as pale as Youngjae, but he still manages to ask with a shaky voice: “which is?”

“I—“ he starts and then stops. Jaebum takes a deep breath and feels the churning in his stomach that comes at the beginning of a confession, continuing, “I can’t kill him. You were all right, Jackson, you especially. I am not the person that I thought I was. So much happened while I’ve been away and I—I just—“ 

He won’t cry in front of them. He refuses; he never has and he never will. But even still he can feel the hot stinging of fresh tears in his eyes that he squeezes shut and presses against with the heels of his hands. The room around him has gone impossibly quieter, the five of them so shocked that Jaebum had shown up unannounced and is breaking in front of them like old brick. He has been their leader and their lynchpin for as long as the majority of them could remember and to see Jaebum forcing back tears in front of them while he confesses brings the atmosphere to a deadly, quiet hush unlike one they’ve ever heard.

He sits up, eyes burning, hands curled to fists on his knees. Saying sorry has never been his strong suit and it feels like pushing against mountains to admit that he was wrong and confess to his wrongdoing knowing full well there will always be consequences. But the thought of killing Jinyoung and the thought of losing them all makes him feel like his heart is made of ice and it’s cracking too fast for him to fix. 

“I’m sorry. All of you. I’m sorry for—for what I did, what I was going to try to do. I should have listened but because I didn’t, I’ve gotten myself, and now all of us, into this mess.” He swallows. “Jinyoung still doesn’t know who I really am. But I can’t do it. I can’t. And I’m so sorry I thought that I could.” 

Everyone looks so somber, eyes cast down or looking a little shiny in the lights of their house. Yugyeom especially looks like he’s about to burst into childish tears right here and now; for both of their sakes he hopes that he doesn’t, knowing that seeing their youngest cry would break him in a way he didn’t think was possible. Not that it wouldn’t hurt if any of them did, of course, but there is something about the triangular bond that had formed between Jinyoung, Yugyeom, and himself when they were growing up that is almost parent like, and it’s always been him who could twist the knife the deepest when he wanted to. But even he is quiet, eyes wet, looking for all the world like he’s just watch the statue of a hero crumble. And perhaps it had. 

Finally, after some silence, Jackson blinks and says,

“What makes you think you can just come in here, say you can’t kill him, say sorry, and we’ll forgive you?” 

He’s right of course, but that doesn’t make it sting any less than a physical slap might have. Jaebum nods but tightens his jaw. 

“I’m not asking for your forgiveness. That will come when and if you’re ready to give it to me. I’m asking for your  _ help.”  _

There’s a beat of silence once more. All of them seem so thrown off by Jaebum’s sudden confession and apology, lapsing into their uncharacteristic silence over and over until someone finds the words to break it. 

Jackson says, voice flat, “you slept together, didn’t you?” 

Part of him feels disgusted, ashamed; angry at himself for letting it come to that, buckling under the weight of a feeling he thought he had buried, but too weak to withstand it when it resurfaced. And it’s not so much the fact of the act that matters but the implication, the situation that it has thrown them in now, where sentiment has snuck back in and set the detonator on something that  _ will  _ explode. All they can do is try to minimize the blast. 

So, he could lie. He could shield them from the truth of it but he knows that any lie from here on out, no matter how small, could bring what fragile balance they have for now crumbling to pieces. He swallows and feels warmth in his cheeks met with snickering from the younger ones as the color in his face gives him away before his mouth does. 

“In a sense,” he says, because they hadn’t exactly… been  _ inside  _ one another, but God forbid if he had to explain that, so lets his expression speak for itself. 

“We figured because of the tabloids,” Bambam pipes up, grinning. The sight of a smile on his face makes Jaebum’s heart squeeze in the most terrible, painful way; good in the sense that it makes him think they are on the path to forgiveness but bad in the sense that he had to earn it back to begin with. He gives Bambam what he can of a smile back before the heartache pulls the corners of his mouth down again. 

“Was it all over the internet again?”

“Oh, yeah,” Youngjae says, scrolling through his phone. “Tons of pictures of when you guys were at the airport and double that of you two coming out of the same hotel room. Some of the reporters even got an angle in front of the door so you can tell there was only one bed.” 

Jaebum squeezes his eyes closed. “Christ.” 

“It’s not so bad,” Mark says nonchalantly, and Jaebum opens his eyes to meet Mark’s. “A little scandalous but nothing he hasn’t dealt with before. I know you wouldn’t acknowledge him the last couple years, but any time he was in the tabloids this way, we’d read it. It never lasted for long and it always blew over when people lost interest. Try not to worry too much.”

This, too, makes the fissure in his heart crack and grow longer. To receive the care he so clearly doesn’t deserve for what he has done to them, in the face of it all, he feels like a man being humbled before God. Hot tears escape his eyes and he looks down between his knees at the floor to try and dry the wet tracks they make on his cheeks. 

Suddenly there’s a pair of slippers in his vision, ratty and busted alligators on the too-big feet of the youngest, a relic from their high school days he has steadfastly refused to let go of. They shift to two knees in ripped jeans as Yugyeom kneels down and throws his arms around Jaebum’s shoulders, anyway, doing what he had been aching to do since he materialized in their living room like a shadow. If the breaking of his heart was audible, he wonders how loud it would be to the rest of them when Youngjae and Bambam join their adopted brother in hugging a crying Jaebum. Hot tears slip quiet and quick down his cheeks as his boys surround him. There’s overlapping murmurs and whispers of  _ it’s okay hyung  _ and  _ we’re going to figure it out hyung  _ and  _ we know you’re sorry  _ and the one that makes his voice crack on a sob,  _ we forgive you.  _ He doesn’t deserve it and his chest feels close to collapsing when he feels Mark’s hand on the top of his hair in silent comfort while his youngest hold him close. 

Only Jackson doesn’t approach, and for this he is deserving, too. But even still, he misses the way Jackson wipes angry tears from his eyes and says,

“We’ll help you, hyung. We’re all going to make it out of this.” 

 

***

 

After he leaves, it feels as though whatever dust there had been to settle between them has, for the most part, begun to do so. There was lots of figurative huddling and brainstorming while Jaebum dabbed at his eyes in the bathroom before coming to stand in the kitchen between Yugyeom and Youngjae and watch the other boys spread out papers upon paper across the same island they had received Jinyoung’s death sentence on all those days ago. Despite his minuscule relief at being somewhat reunited with them, he can’t shake the sensation of falling; it's as though he had somewhere stepped into a rabbit hole and now this life passes by him in a Wonderland-like slow motion that he can’t get out of. 

The youngest are reluctant to let him leave when he quietly announces that he has to, recognizing by the time on his watch that Jinyoung’s shoot will be done sometime in the near future and he would like some time to himself to sort out how he feels here and how he feels there. There’s also the looming thought of how he’s going to reveal all of this to him with minimal damage: between Jackson and Jinyoung it has always been a study in grudge holding at who could keep one longer. And this is no petty matter, no stolen jackets or shoes or missing alcohol. This is the last thirteen years of their lives. More than that, it’s the missing thirteen years of their lives intertwined with five others, on top of the death sentence some person has dangled over his head that Jaebum knew about and attempted to take. 

Regardless, it’s something that must be done, and until they come up with a plan and he comes up with a plan to tell Jinyoung, there is still a job to be done. Jaebum allows himself to be briefly hugged by all of them, except Jackson, who watches on apprehensively with folded arms. Jaebum gives him a sad smile that isn’t returned; he is much like a wounded dog in this way, large brown eyes wide with wanting to receive affection, but mistrustful of the sly hand often held behind a back. Jaebum cannot and will not fault him for this, but he can’t deny that there is a piece of his warmth missing as Jaebum leaves the house once more in a shiny black car. 

Once he’s back in the parking lot of the venue where Jinyoung is filming, he gets a text from Jinyoung’s manager saying that the shoot is wrapping up and he should be finished within half an hour. The sun has mostly gone down, now, and Jaebum leans his head against the back of the seat to watch it disappear behind the horizon line and think about how telling Jinyoung who he really is might ruin everything they’ve built and bled for. 

So much about Jinyoung has changed, although there are things that have remained fundamentally the same, but the change is enough that his reaction is unpredictable, and Jaebum has never given himself room for variables. In all of their missions there was a plan and it was followed to the letter; if things went haywire then it was a lesson in adaptation, but they never planned for variables, because in Jaebum’s mind they should not exist. Not in this line of work. And yet it seems like Jinyoung is, as he’s always been, the exception to the rule. No matter how much planning or training Jaebum had, he could have never prepared himself for this.

Will he be happy? Angry? Does he already know, and has he been carefully acting just like Jaebum has? Part of him thinks that this last part couldn’t be true, that if he did know there is no way he’d be able to hide it. But then he has made a career on acting, and so Jaebum’s thoughts circle back once more to the endless possible outcomes. He closes his eyes where his head rests against the cold window. It has already been a long, tiresome day full of emotion and he knows it’s not quite over yet. Regardless of whether he tells Jinyoung tonight, or tomorrow, or next week, the emotion hangs heavy over his head like a guillotine.

After letting his thoughts chase themselves in circles for a little bit longer, he sees the studio door open and watches as Jinyoung is escorted out by one of the guards that Jaebum had threatened earlier. The man in the dark suit just nods at him, once, not going back into the building until Jinyoung is pulling open the passenger door and sliding into the seat.

He seems upbeat, sunglasses tucked into the neck of his sweater as he twists to put on his seatbelt and look over at him. “Hi, hyung. Did you finish your errand?”

Jaebum nods, not offering much more as he throws the car in reverse and heads toward Jinyoung’s house. After a suspended moment like Jinyoung is patiently waiting for detail, Jaebum says, “it was fine. It didn’t take very long.”

“Oh? How long were you sitting out in the parking lot?” 

“Only about thirty minutes or so.”

He glances over at Jinyoung as he makes a turn toward the neighborhood. His brows are furrowed, staring at the dashboard as though he’s trying to figure out some problem in his head; Jaebum wants to ask but instead stays quiet to give him the opportunity to bring it up if it’s bothering him. 

Jinyoung does a moment later, fiddling with the seatbelt buckle as he looks over. “What’s wrong?”

Startled, Jaebum looks over at him briefly. “Huh?”

“What’s the matter? You sound so tired.”

God, if only he could explain to Jinyoung just how tired he really is. He’s tired of this, of all of it, of the hiding and the lying and the disguises. He’s tired of the acting. He’s tired of having to tiptoe around everything that Jinyoung does or says lest he give himself away, and he’s tired of the show he puts on for the public, much preferring to stay in the shadows of the public eye rather than in the focus of it. In the thirteen years that he has been a hitman, he has done a lot of exhausting things: taking lives, burying bodies, evading the police. It surprises him that acting could be the most tiring thing he has ever had to do. 

Pulling up into the driveway after waiting for the gates to open, Jaebum puts the car in park and hesitates with his eyes on the center of the wheel. 

“I  _ am _ tired,” he says, and his heart stutters anxiously that he might confess right here and now. “I’m tired––”

“Of me?” 

Jaebum looks over at him, a little surprised: Jinyoung is biting his lips, a physical mirror of the crushing feeling in Jaebum’s chest. He can see outlined in the dim, orange light from the streetlamps beyond the walls that his chest is heaving, breathing unevenly like he’s preparing for something to break. Jaebum opens his mouth to say something like  _ I could never get tired of you, even when you were gone  _ but he loses his courage and just puts a hand on Jinyoung’s leg.

“No, I’m not tired of you. I don’t––it’s hard to explain––”

“It’s okay,” Jinyoung murmurs softly, putting his hand over Jaebum’s, and the sight of their layered hands on the dark leg of his pants in the soft light does something awful to his heart. It feels somewhat like breaking, as though the fissure in it is growing, pulling the edges apart to reveal the canyon underneath. “You don’t have to. Let’s go inside and I’ll make you dinner, and then we can––” 

He pauses, unsure what to say next, it seems like, since he looks down at their hands and chews his lip. Jaebum is sure he’s trying to think of the thing that will spook him the least, and in Jinyoung’s best interest, Jaebum doesn’t tell him what his own desire really is.

“We can––take a shower––but not like, together,” he says, stuttering, and despite the dread that has been settled on his shoulders since he’d come to the realization that he’s in over his head, Jaebum manages to smile. Jinyoung sees it and starts to blush a deep, scarlet red as he tries to continue, “unless you want to? But, um, we don’t have to, and then we can, I don’t know, watch a movie and go to bed, but––”

“Yeah, that sounds good,” Jaebum says, smiling, though he feels like the corners might be tinged with a pain Jinyoung can’t understand yet. “We can do that.”

“Which part?”

Jinyoung’s flush deepens as Jaebum squeezes his thigh and lets go to get out. “All of it.” 

As they’re walking up to the house, Jinyoung turns to him just as he’s going to unlock the door. There’s a sheepish grin on his face, one that Jaebum knows well; this is one of the things that remained fundamentally unchanged, his embarrassment, and just as it had all of the other times he has seen it, it strikes him in the most painful way to see the glimpse of the boy he’d been before he left. 

“Do you actually mind making dinner?” Jinyoung asks, opening the door and toeing his shoes off as Jaebum bursts into surprised laughter when he follows. “Don’t laugh! I’m serious! You remember what happened last time I tried to cook, don’t you?”

Jaebum slaps his back lightly and goes into the kitchen. Jinyoung follows, shedding the jacket he’d been wearing and laying it over the back of one of the chairs in the dining room. He finds a nice spot to lean back against the island in the center of the kitchen and watches him quietly as Jaebum digs through the cabinets and refrigerator for something to make.

“I do remember,” Jaebum says, looking over his shoulder at where Jinyoung is watching him, unfairly fond. He looks away as he puts a pot of water on the stove and sets it to boil. “You almost burnt down your entire house.”

“Good thing you were here then, right?” Jinyoung laughs, and though he’d said it off hand, it still sticks in Jaebum’s throat in a strange way. He seems to notice the strange look on Jaebum’s face and his laugh tapers off into unsurety. “Hyung?” 

“Hm?”

“Are you okay?” 

Jaebum tries to play it off. “Why wouldn’t I be?” he says, bumping their elbows together as he passes to lean against the counter across from him while they wait for the water on the stove to boil. Neither of them say anything else right away, and the atmosphere begins to move away from the playful one they’d sort of tripped into when they arrived, evolving into something more serious and tense in a way that makes Jaebum supremely uncomfortable.

Jinyoung just keeps looking at him: it’s unsettling, in its way, to have this ghost be real again, standing just a couple feet away from him and staring a hole through him in the way he’d been doing to his memory. Jaebum tries to look away from him a couple times, looking down at Jinyoung’s neck, his slim shoulders, the arms crossed over his chest that have filled out much more than he would have expected from the thin, lanky boy he’d known, even at eighteen. His chest no longer heaves erratically as it had in the car with embarrassment but is steady as he studies Jaebum with the dark chocolate of his eyes, taking their time on every part of his body like he’s trying to memorize it. The scrutiny makes the ache in his heart hurt worse.

“Jinyoung,” he murmurs, slipping from Sejin just a bit, letting the truth of himself come through in his voice, and is pained when Jinyoung doesn’t recognize it on sound alone.

Without saying anything, Jinyoung steps forward into his space, fitting both feet into the gap that Jaebum’s spread legs had made when he planted them and leaned back. Jaebum’s heart thumps and he doesn’t uncross his arms even as Jinyoung slides his arms around his neck and presses their bodies together as close as he can with the obstruction at their chests. 

“Hyung,” he murmurs, face closer, inches away from his own, and Jaebum swallows hard when he realizes that Jinyoung’s eyes are paradoxically lighter and darker from this close. He wishes that Jinyoung could just see into his soul, pull out the truth, so that Jaebum wouldn’t have to try to fit it into words. The thought of trying to explain to Jinyoung  _ I missed you so much I thought I could kill you  _ makes his stomach drop.

“Hm?” he murmurs, lips parting when he can feel the warmth of Jinyoung’s breath on them.

“Will you hold me?”

Without answering, Jaebum carefully undoes his arms and wraps them around Jinyoung’s waist, using his grip to pull him flush against the length of his body. Jinyoung gasps lightly when their mouths almost connect, but he leans back just enough to make Jinyoung whine pitifully in his throat at the lack of contact. 

“Jerk,” he says, but with the corners of his mouth pulled up in a smile. He tilts his head and looks up at Jaebum from beneath his lashes in a way that both makes his stomach warm and his heart constrict painfully. Leave it to Jinyoung to be both sinfully sensual and heartbreakingly gorgeous all at once, the amalgamation of things he’d always been with the new things he has become. A man. One that Jaebum missed out on getting to know, only to get to know him under the guise of someone else. 

It’s so unfair he could die.

“What are you thinking about?” Jinyoung asks softly, gentle fingers carding through the long hair at the back of his neck, raising goosebumps on his arms. Jaebum lets his own fingers trace circles in the small of Jinyoung’s back as they watch each other in comfortable quiet.

“You,” he says, being honest. “Always you.” This, too, is not a lie. As much as he wants to deny it, there had never been a time where Park Jinyoung didn’t cross his mind. For better or for worse, he had always been there. 

“So you  _ do _ think about me?” Jinyoung teases, wrapping some of the hair around the knuckles of his fingers and tugging playfully. Jaebum smiles and knows it doesn’t reach his eyes. 

“Yes.”

“You’re so stubborn. You know that, don’t you? You were so awful when you first arrived. Even though I found you attractive, I thought there was no way I’d ever even get along with you, even if I tried.”

The last thing Jaebum wants to do right now is reminisce about a life that doesn’t really exist. He swallows and says, “Jinyoung––”

“But look at you now,” he purrs, pushing his body closer, connected chests to stomachs to hips. His arms tighten around Jaebum’s neck to hold it still as he leans all the way up to brush their lips together.

It feels like static shock, kissing him, even though it’s not the first time. Some unnamed power hums through his body like a downed powerline when they kiss, even under false pretense, and Jaebum allows himself to fall into the feeling of Jinyoung’s lips on his as he deepens the kiss. Jaebum parts his lips when Jinyoung gently runs his tongue along the seam of them, making a breathless noise when Jinyoung gently licks behind his teeth. Both of Jaebum’s hands fist in the material of Jinyoung’s shirt at his lower back and presses him as tight to his body as hard as he can, as though he could physically pull Jinyoung inside of him. 

“Hyung,” Jinyoung whispers, hands in his long hair now, body taut along Jaebum’s. Their kiss goes from the slow, gentle pace it had started with to something heavier, needier. One of Jaebum’s hands slides down to grip Jinyoung’s ass; Jinyoung twitches and moans into his open mouth. “Sejin––”

The name drops ice water down his back. At the exact same time it paralyzes him, the water in the pot boils over, long forgotten about when Jinyoung stepped closer, and the steamy hissing of the water on the hot stovetop makes Jinyoung jump backward in surprise. 

“Shit!” Jinyoung barks, stepping aside when Jaebum leaps forward to turn the burner off with his heart thumping loudly in his ears. The steam burns his wrist a bit as he reaches to grab the pot handle and shove it back off the hot burner. Behind him, Jinyoung starts laughing.

“Whoops,” he says in faux sheepishness, although he blushes a bit when Jaebum turns back around to face him. “Sorry, I was getting a little carried away––”

“Yeah, I’ll say,” Jaebum mutters, though it’s without malice, and the guilty flushing on his cheeks just makes Jinyoung laugh even more. 

“Come on,” Jinyoung says, stepping closer to him, but motioning for the door. “I know we just got here, but let's just go down to the corner store and eat ramen at the counter. What do you say?” 

“I’d rather be eating something else,” Jaebum jabs playfully, although it takes Jinyoung a moment to get the joke. When he does, his face turns red all the way up to the tops of his ears and he slaps Jaebum’s chest hard even as he laughs and tries to twist away.

“Hyung! Oh, my god!”

“That’s payback,” Jaebum says, finally feeling some semblance of stability return to his head. If they can joke around like this, maybe it won’t be so bad, maybe they will get through this with as little bloodshed as possible. He reaches into his pocket to pull out the car keys, trying and failing to catch his wallet when it gets yanked out by a stuck key and lands on the floor.

“That’s way more vulgar than what  _ I  _ said,” Jinyoung grumbles, leaning down to pick up Jaebum’s wallet for him. As he hands it over and stands back up, a piece of paper falls out and flutters to the ground.

Jaebum sees it at the same time Jinyoung does, and as Jinyoung says “what’s this?”, it’s as though time slows to a crawl and then stops completely, save for the way Jinyoung reaches all the way down to pick it up. A scream of _ don’t look at that, give it to me  _ makes its way up Jaebum’s throat and sticks, choking him, eyes widening as he watches Jinyoung rise to a stand with the folded paper in one hand and pulling the edges apart to open it. 

Even without seeing the front of it, Jaebum has it memorized regardless, and time has thinned the coating of it, making some details of the photo visible in the light through the plain white back. Rounded, fuzzy edges and white crease lines from thousands of folds and unfolds, small tears from the times it was shoved into the dresser drawer or yanked forcefully from underneath a stack of books. The shades of green, of tan, of black and brown, the gold glint of tassels slung over graduation caps. 

All Jaebum can do now is watch in unbridled horror as Jinyoung unfolds the photo and looks at it. The breath is squeezed from his lungs as Jinyoung’s face changes: first it seems amused; upon first glance, it’s just an old graduation photo taken on a field. Then the smile drops, eyes wide, then slitted as he brings it closer to him to take in the details: Jackson and Mark in the background, laughing, wind trailing through Jackson’s gown. Youngjae and Bambam, thirteen years younger and smaller than the men they’d grow into, hanging off each other and looking on the scene that’s framed in the center of the photograph. Jaebum’s nervous system freezes and collapses as Jinyoung’s face drops into a mask of some unnamed horror as he looks at himself laughing on Yugyeom’s back while Jaebum stands right next to them, all of them frozen in laughter.

_ No, God, _ he pleads silently, to whoever and whatever might be listening.  _ God, no, not like this. He can’t find out like this.  _

“What—“ Jinyoung tries, but his voice cracks dangerously as his fingers curl in the picture. He nearly crumples it in his hand, and he flinches backward when Jaebum starts to reach for it out of reflex. 

“What is this?” he finally manages, his handsome face drained to paper white, hand and voice shaking as he holds the picture up. “What is this?” 

“It’s—“

“Don’t you  _ dare  _ say ‘it’s a picture’, you bastard,” Jinyoung warbles. His eyes are big and wet but no tears fall as he speaks through clenched teeth. “I know what it is. Why do you have this? Why the  _ fuck _ do you have this?” 

“Jinyoung—“ Jaebum tries, but his voice catches in his throat like a fishhook. Nothing else follows and Jinyoung looks at the picture again in utter disbelief so physically displayed on his face it’s almost tangible. 

“How? How could you possibly have this—? Did you take this out of my room?” 

“No,” Jaebum says, voice a deadly calm, but only as thin as ice before it shatters under a footstep. “Do you have that picture too?” 

“‘Too’?” he barks, shaking all over. “No, I don’t have this! Did you find this in here somewhere? Sejin, how do you have this picture of me? How did you get this?” 

“Because,” he says, and his knees feel so weak that he has to grip the lip of the island to keep from buckling. The breath that leaves him is ragged, serrated edge blades pulling out of his lungs as Jinyoung stares at him with wide, teary eyes. The secret he has tried so hard to keep spilled like hot blood from a cut throat from something so simple. Of all things to expose him, it had been the photo in his wallet, his guilty shame from years of preaching that sentiment will get them killed. 

And he was right. He hopes more than anything he is struck down right here in Jinyoung’s kitchen. If the look on his face was enough to do it, he would be dead where he stood already. 

“Because what?” Jinyoung shouts, voice quivering. His teeth are locked so tightly together Jaebum is worried they’re going to break. “Answer me! Because  _ what?” _

“Because it’s  _ mine,  _ Jinyoung,” Jaebum says, and his own voice is barely above a whisper. “It’s  _ mine.”  _

“Why would you—“ he starts, then stops, eyes going impossibly wider as the silence fuels the realization that slowly trickles in. Jinyoung’s knees do buckle, and he falls back against the counter with the picture crumpling in the hand he uses to grab the edge to keep from falling. “No. No—“

“Jinyoung,” Jaebum pleads, chest so tight he feels like he’s suffocating. “Jinyoung, please, wait—“

“No, no, no, no, nononononono—“ Jinyoung covers his face with his hands as he repeats it over and over, sucking in deep, broken breaths, picture still clutched tightly between his fingers. “Nononononono—“

Jaebum comes forward, roughly grabbing his wrists and trying to pull them away from his face, heart pounding harder than he’s ever felt it. Not even in the face of sudden death did it beat like it was going to break apart. 

“Jinyoung, let me explain—“ 

With a grunt that turns into a guttural noise of anguish, Jinyoung shoves him backward with the grip Jaebum has on his wrists, hard. Jaebum lets go as he stumbles backward, hip cracking against the corner of the island and sending him askew as he hits the floor on his side. 

“Prove it,” Jinyoung seethes, cheeks wet now as hot tears streak down his face. Jaebum looks up at him from where he landed. He shakes the photo at him. “Prove to me you’re him, or I swear to god, I’m going to take a knife and jam it right between your fucking ribs.” 

And he knows he will, too; Jinyoung may have softened in his years away from the streets, but when he roamed them, he was quick to anger and violent, too. Jinyoung had always been best with a knife in his hand and Jaebum has no doubt that muscle memory would send that knife with a killing blow. 

And he deserves it. God, does he deserve it.

But he just pulls himself up off the floor, head full of bees. He can feel the fire of Jinyoung’s eyes on his back as he roughly tears off a paper towel from the roll and goes to the sink: he gets it wet, making do and using dish soap to rub it to a lather. Jaebum faces Jinyoung and puts the wet towel to his eye where he has been so painstakingly covering the moles Jinyoung used to trace like a constellation. He locks their eyes and scrubs at the place, hard, both to make sure the heavy makeup comes off and because he deserves the pain of the raw, angered skin. 

When he’s sure that it’s been erased, he throws the dirtied paper towel down hard on the island with a wet smack, heart aching, and clenches his teeth to let Jinyoung see.

Everything is so, so still. There’s no rustling of the trees against the window, no sound of traffic down the street, no creaking as the house settles, every sound sucked out in a vacuum as Jinyoung looks at the dark dotted moles above his eye and gasps like he’d been stabbed. 

“It’s––it’s  _ you,”  _ Jinyoung groans, and he can’t tell what kind of emotion that’s supposed to carry, but by the way his knees buckle and he falls heavily against the counter again, Jaebum can assume it’s something akin to rage and grief. Jinyoung stares into his face as though he’s seeing it for the first time, fresh tears welling, breathing like he’s dying. “It’s you.”

“Yes,” Jaebum says, because there’s nothing else for him to say. This is the truth. He would be relieved that he no longer had to try and find the words to tell him on his own, but having the rug pulled out from under him so quickly is not a good alternative. Jaebum swallows and blinks back the hot tears that threaten his own eyes. 

“All this time––” Jinyoung’s breath hitches and he chokes. He wraps his arms around his own waist, picture still in his hand, though crumpled crookedly now. “You’ve been alive this whole time? God, and you were  _ here?  _ With me? Oh, my god––”

He wants to comfort him, but he doesn’t know how. Jaebum just watches with his heart sinking as Jinyoung puts his face in his hands again. 

When he pulls them away again, he looks angry. “All this time. You’ve been lying to me all this time?” 

“Yes.”

“And that night––” Jinyoung looks stricken; he slaps the ruined photograph onto the counter, stepping forward to jab a finger into Jaebum’s chest. “That night wasn’t a dream, was it? That night I got really drunk.” his hand cards through his hair and shakes when it does. “I thought––I thought, there was no way that you carried me to bed. That you wouldn’t do that. Sejin would never do that. There’s pieces missing, I was so drunk––but I remember when I woke up I thought I had dreamt it. That I hadn’t told anyone about Jaebum or the boys since the moment I set foot in the city with nothing but the clothes on my back, and there was no way I would tell Sejin about it. When you never mentioned it, I––” his voice cracks. “I thought I just dreamt it, that it was wishful thinking––”

“Jinyoung––” Jaebum tries, desperate for his turn, but he knows he won’t get it. He tries to reach for Jinyoung’s wrist again, wanting to hold some part of him, but Jinyoung gets angry and pushes him back. 

“No!” he nearly shouts, both hands on Jaebum’s chest and shoving. “Whatever you have to say, I don’t want to hear it! You  _ lied _ to me!”

“I had to!” Jaebum argues back, hands tightening, but just gritting his teeth as Jinyoung shoves at his chest again. If there was ever a time he deserved the same violence he once inflicted on others, it’s now. “I had to, Jinyoung, god, let me  _ explain _ ––”

“Explain what! Tell me how you found me!” 

“Jinyoung,” he pleads, and when Jinyoung shoves at him again, backing him into the island, Jaebum roughly grabs both of his wrists and holds with a grip so tight he can feel the bones shifting under his fingers. “Listen to me!” 

“I don’t want to! Liar!” he thrashes against Jaebum’s grip, but he doesn’t let go. 

_ It’s now or never, Jaebum.  _

“I’m here because someone wants you dead, Jinyoung! I’m here because someone hired me to kill you!” 

Jinyoung freezes. “You...you were going to kill me?” 

“I was supposed to, but I––” Jaebum chokes and squeezes his fingers tighter when Jinyoung tries to pull away harder, like a wounded animal suddenly trapped by the thing that had hurt it in the first place. “I can’t, Jinyoung, god, I missed you so much––”

_ “Liar!”  _ Jinyoung shouts at him, and an awful, broken sob escapes from his mouth as he pushes against Jaebum’s grip so hard that his back bends over it a little. “You fucking liar!”

“I’m not lying!” Jaebum shouts back, using his strength to move Jinyoung backward. He gets them a couple steps away from the island before Jinyoung is hitting his chest with his hands where Jaebum still grips his wrists. “God, Jinyoung, I’m not lying! It’s what I was here for but after being with you I can’t do it, I can’t––”

“But you were going to?” he seethes through his tears, “after being away from me for all this time the first thing you were going to do was get close enough to kill me? Who ordered it, huh?” Jinyoung shoves Jaebum  _ hard,  _ and Jaebum pulls him with him as he stumbles backward. “Who ordered the hit on me? Was it you?” 

“No! I don’t know who it was, Jinyoung, I swear, please, just  _ listen––” _

_ “No!  _ I don’t want to listen to you anymore! Let me  _ go!”  _

“Jinyoung, please, I went to go see the guys today, they’re going to help us get out of this––”

Jinyoung laughs, but it sounds hysterical and wild, and it raises goosebumps on Jaebum’s arms. “Us?  _ Us?  _ You think there’s an us? You think I want their help after finding out you were supposed to kill me? Were they in on it too, huh?” 

“No,” Jaebum says honestly. “They’re not––”

“I don’t believe you!” 

Jaebum shakes him by the grip on his arms, frustrated and crazy with heartache as the fault line in his heart grows and completely cracks it open while Jinyoung cries in front of him upon the revelation. “Jinyoung––”

Always just a little more slippery than Jaebum accounts for, Jinyoung finally manages to twist a wrist out of Jaebum’s grip, yanking it back quick before he sends a fist forward right into the side of Jaebum’s jaw, near enough to his mouth that his lip gets caught between his teeth and the skin slices open. With a grunt Jaebum immediately lets go and hits the counter behind him while his jaw pulses with pain and blood wells on his lip before running down his chin.

“Stop saying my name like that!” Jinyoung shouts, angrily wiping an arm across his eyes before dropping it down to his side. “All your excuses, your lies––”

“They were to protect you––”

“You just said you came here to  _ kill me!”  _

“At first!” Jaebum shouts over him, not bothering to wipe the blood away. “I thought I could come here, do the job, and the boys would get the money, even if they didn’t want it! I thought after thirteen years of being abandoned by you––”

_ “Abandoned?”  _ he squeaks, incredulous, but Jaebum roars over him:

“Be  _ quiet!  _ Yes! After thirteen years of being abandoned you, I thought I could do it, and I thought it would bring us peace! You think they’re in on this, Jinyoung, but they’re not. Ever since they saw you on TV for the first time, god, they’ve watched everything you’ve ever been in! Shows, movies, interviews, variety shows. They love you, they love you so much, they didn’t want me to take this, but I did––”

And now the tears are really coming: Jinyoung’s whole body shakes with sobs, as though every word that Jaebum shouts at him about their makeshift family is a fresh wound opened and rubbed with salt. 

“Then why?” he sobs, and Jaebum wants to go to him, but he realizes that the break he had been expecting has already come, and it hurts so much more than he ever thought possible. “Why, Jaebum? Why?” 

It strikes him, then, that this is the first time Jinyoung has referred to him directly by his name. His chest cracks open and the canyon of his heart fills with dirty blood.

“They didn’t want me to do it, they missed you so much. But I took it because I thought I could do it, I thought I could bring them peace, relieve them of the agony I know they felt in their beds when they thought of how you didn’t know if they were alive or if you cared that they were.” 

Jaebum’s voice breaks. “I took it because I hated you.”

Silence falls then, the worst kind of silence that Jaebum has ever heard; it’s as brittle as glass and hurts just as much when Jinyoung breaks it.

He takes in a deep breath, ragged and uneven. Jaebum looks Jinyoung in the eyes where he’s still backed up against the corner with blood on his face and a gaping hole in his heart. 

“It will never,” he starts to say between his teeth, although his voice breaks and he has to start over, “it will  _ never  _ compare to how much I hate you, Im Jaebum. “

Somehow, hearing Jinyoung say his name like that, in full for the first time in so, so long makes it so much more real. Jaebum just closes his eyes and doesn’t try to stop him when Jinyoung turns on his heel and storms out of the house.

Alone again, Jaebum allows himself the pain of losing Jinyoung for the second time. 

  
  
  


Jinyoung doesn’t return for a long time. Jaebum sits on the kitchen floor for a while, resigned to sitting there when his knees buckle and he slides against the counter until he hits the tile and just stays that way as the hours turn over one by one. He knows that, by letting Jinyoung leave by himself, he has broken the cardinal rule of the job he was supposed to do, and any consequence of it is one he has not prepared for. Part of him thinks it doesn’t matter, anyway: Jinyoung knows the truth, now, and no matter what happens, Jaebum has the feeling that the only way this is going to end is with his body in the dirt. 

As he pulls himself up off the floor, stiff and aching with a throbbing lip, he thinks that the faster it comes, the better. 

No longer held down by pretenses, Jaebum takes himself upstairs to his room and closes the door behind him before laying on the bed to stare at the ceiling. He’s undeniably worried about Jinyoung and his current state; if he took the car, he’s sure that he’s either going to get himself killed or arrested; the public would  _ love  _ to tear the story apart if they even got a whisper of him in handcuffs, and the publicity of an incident like that would no doubt come back to him and put him front and center, which he’s trying to avoid. But never has a job had so many variables, and never has one been so personal. 

Jaebum’s eyes start to slip closed, thinking about how, no matter if Jinyoung wants anything to do with them or not, he’s going to have to let them help him: someone, they don’t know who, wants Jinyoung dead, and if Jaebum doesn’t complete the job, he knows the higher ups at Knight Group will find someone who will. Or, worse still, the person who wanted him dead to begin with will finish the job. Either way, someone will see to it that it is done, and Jaebum will fight until his last breath to make sure that it doesn’t happen.

After a while, the thoughts and the emotions start to tire him out, and he falls asleep laying sideways on the bed with weak moonlight spilling in the window. The sleep is shallow and fitful, full of dreams that stretch and distort and oscillate like the window of a kaleidoscope. Jaebum doesn’t wake up to the sound of the front door opening after hours of dead silence in Jinyoung’s absence, but he jerks awake in a panic when the knob of his bedroom door slams into the wall with a deafening  _ BANG!  _

He sits up, heart thumping, thinking that this is really where his life ends––but it’s just Jinyoung, standing in the doorway in shadow, visibly shaking with his cellphone clutched tightly in one hand. There’s dried blood on his knuckles, visible in the light when Jinyoung steps into the room and holds the phone out.

“Jaebum,” Jinyoung says, and his voice is so hoarse and broken it sounds like a wheeze. “Wake up.” 

“I’m awake,” he replies, gripping the sheets, afraid of the look on Jinyoung’s face: it’s so  _ dead,  _ so empty and void of emotion, splotches of color from crying and screaming paled in the moonlight as he holds the hand clutching his cellphone toward Jaebum. “What’s wrong? What happened? Where did you go––?”

Jinyoung’s breath hiccups. His thumb presses a button on the lit up screen, bringing up his list of voicemails. Jaebum’s eyebrows furrow as Jinyoung presses the most recent one and puts it on speaker, hand shaking violently as a robotic, distorted voice comes through the speakers, chilling Jaebum to the bone:

“WE KNOW THE CONTRACT HAS BEEN BROKEN. PARK JINYOUNG MUST DIE OR BE DELIVERED TO US IN 72 HOURS OR THE HOSTAGE WILL DIE INSTEAD.” 

Silence, but the voicemail isn’t over. Jaebum opens his mouth to say something, but Jinyoung shakes his head.  _ Wait. _

There’s the muffled sound of moving over the speaker, and a dull thud like a blow landing; his eyes meet Jinyoung’s in shock and he wants to say something, anything, but Jinyoung’s lips are pressed tightly together like he’s trying to keep from throwing up. There’s another thud, another blow landing, and the subsequent, familiar whimper makes Jaebum’s blood freeze to ice. 

“Hyungs,” Yugyeom cries, voice echoing. “Hyungs, hel––”

But he doesn’t finish: the recording ends, and the voicemail stops. Jaebum feels paralyzed by terror, eyes on Jinyoung’s. 

“They took him, Jaebum. We have to get him back.”

 

 


	12. 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mea culpa  
>  mea máxima culpa

 

The room spins. 

Jaebum takes a shortened, painful breath. “What—“

Jinyoung lowers the phone without saying anything. Their eyes hold in the half dark, Jinyoung washed out to pale greys by the moon, looking like the ghost that Jaebum has always pictured him to be in the years he was gone. He aches for Jinyoung to say something, anything; for something to make sense, to not be real, to make the pain in his heart end for good. He had done the unthinkable a hundred times over and this is somehow worse. His chest aches like he’s been holding his breath for centuries and he just wants the pain to end.

“Jinyoung—“

He’s interrupted again by the ringing of his own phone on the bed behind him. Jaebum twists quickly and nearly dives for it, seeing the picture of himself and Jackson on the screen, name flashing as he scrambles to pick it up. 

“Jackson,” he breathes when he answers, holding it up to his ear. “Jackson, are you—“

“Hyung, we just got a phone call, they––they––someone took Yugyeom, we don’t know how, he was just––” Jackson’s voice breaks, his breathing is labored, every word sounding like it’s being forced out of him with the tip of a knife: “He told us he was just going to walk down to the corner store, asked us if we wanted anything and then––he––he was gone for so long and then when we started to worry we––hyung, oh, god, hyung, they took him––”

Just from the sound of his voice he can tell that Jackson is a hair's breadth away from hysterics. Jaebum leans on his elbow on the bed, bent over, one hand gripping his hair while his heart slams painfully hard against his ribs. Nothing like this has ever happened before––they could have never dreamed of this, they were always so careful, every step of a job planned down to the second. Jaebum tried so hard to keep them a secret; to keep them out of the camera’s eye, to bury them in the shadows of the city, to walk along the precarious line between the world that existed in the day and the one they prowled in the in-between. Never could they have fathomed they’d be found, and Jaebum’s head spins at the thought that it had not just been sentiment to tumble their empire, but naivete. 

Jaebum takes a deep breath through his nose and tries to ignore the utter madness going on inside his head. Eyes closed, he puts pressure on his temple and says, “Jackson, Jackson, you have to try to calm down––”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!” he shouts, making Jaebum wince away from the phone. “Hyung! Yugyeom is  _ gone.  _ Did you not get the same voicemail that we got? They  _ took  _ him, hyung, and it’s  _ your fault––”  _

_ “My  _ fault? You’re going to blame this on me? If the contract didn’t get broken––”

“Yeah,  _ your fault!”  _

“If the contract didn’t get broken,” he shouts over him, sweating and frustrated, “then Jinyoung would have died! We have a chance at saving Yugyeom, but you had  _ no  _ chance of saving Jinyoung before this! Don’t you  _ dare _ blame this on me––”

Jackson wails, “if you hadn’t taken this stupid job in the first place––”

“Then he’d  _ be dead!”  _ Jaebum drops his face into his hand and tries to hold it together, but everything feels like it’s falling apart too fast for him to grab all the pieces. “He’d be dead, Jackson! Someone else would have done it and you couldn’t have stopped that, either!” 

He opens his mouth to continue, but Jackson simultaneously hangs up on him the exact same moment Jinyoung’s open hand swipes the back of his head,  _ hard.  _ Jaebum’s elbow jerks out from under him with the sudden movement and he hits the bed on his face before sitting back up and rubbing his hair.

“Don’t talk to them like that,” Jinyoung says, voice flat and emotionless save for the little tint of anger at the very end. “He’s right. This  _ is _ your fault.”

“Jinyoung––”

Jinyoung whirls on him where he had turned around to leave the room. “Don’t. Whatever excuse you’re going to try and give me, I don’t want to hear it. Whether you like it or not, this is your fault, and you need to man up and accept it. Get up and let’s go. We only have 72 hours to find him and it will be a cold day in hell before I let you get him killed.” 

And with that, he sweeps from the room, leaving the door open so that Jaebum has no other option but to get up and follow. 

  
  
  


They don’t speak again until they’re in the car. The air between them is absolutely bricked with tension, so thick and choking that Jaebum can feel it like a physical weight against his chest as he tries to keep himself from speeding. So many possibilities run through his head, chasing each one for a short burst before his mind tanks and goes in a different direction. He can hear the ragged breathing tearing from his chest as he panics in the driver’s seat and still tries to keep from getting caught by the police for recklessly weaving through the side streets. 

“Give me Jackson’s phone number,” Jinyoung says suddenly, startling him. Jinyoung doesn’t look over when he says it, focused on his phone. For all Jaebum knows, that goddamn thing is bugged too; it has to be something on Jinyoung. His house, the car, his phone. Something. 

“No.”

“Why? Want to keep me a surprise?” Jinyoung snarls. The edges of his words catch on the open wound of Jaebum’s chest like jagged hooks. “I think it’s a little late for that.”

His fingers tighten on the wheel. He’s so close to breaking; it had just piled on and on and on over the course of the days that had passed since the one where Jinyoung’s photo fell upon their countertop. The weight of the years has finally settled across his shoulders to the point where he can feel his back start to break with the effort of it. 

“I just want to talk to him—“

“We’ll be there soon—“

_ “No! _ ” Jinyoung actually shouts, and it scares him into jerking the wheel a little to the side before he slams his foot down harder on the gas pedal and grinds his teeth. “That’s enough! Don’t you think they’ve suffered enough? Just let me—!” 

The light turns red, but he sees it too late to stop gently: Jaebum hits the brakes hard enough to make Jinyoung’s seatbelt lock as he jerks forward with a choked off cry. Jaebum hits the steering wheel with both hands so hard that the horn blares, once, echoing in the empty streets glittering with an unseasonal rain. 

“Shut up! Shut  _ up! _ ” Jaebum shouts. His heart thunders in his chest so hard he can feel every piece of it that chips off like ice and disappears into the fray of the mess they’d made. “I won’t let you hurt them again, not like this! You see them on my terms or not at all!”

“That’s not fair,” Jinyoung says between his teeth. Jaebum wants to look over but he can see the wetness of Jinyoung’s eyes without even turning, the image of it permanently stained. “They’re adults. They aren’t your children, you can’t say—“

_ Please turn green. Please turn green.  _ The longer they sit at the light the longer that the fissure between their hearts grows; he can no longer take it. Jaebum grips the wheel and tries not to bash his head into it when he shouts,

“I’ve spent the last thirteen years of my life protecting them from you!”

_ “Protecting  _ then from me?!” Jinyoung scoffs, incredulous. “Jaebum, I wasn’t even  _ there!”  _

“That’s my point! That’s my  _ point!”  _ And never more in his life has Jaebum wanted to drag him from the car and beat him. He’s so angry he could die. “They needed you, and you weren’t there!” he shouts, tearing at his hair, and it sounds like he’s begging for Jinyoung to understand. “All this time, all they needed was you to be there, and you weren’t—don’t you understand? I did what I could to protect them from you, but they  _ love  _ you, they  _ love you,  _ Jinyoung, they watched all your shows—“

Jinyoung’s face is wet now, and the broken gasp that escapes his mouth sounds like he’s drowning. “Hyung—“

But now the words are here and they will not stop. Green splashes the inside of the car like an alien blood but the streets are empty and Jaebum does not go. He clutches the material of his jacket over his chest like he could physically stop his heart from breaking as badly as it is.

“Everything, even if just for a moment, if there was a chance they could see you, they watched it. And it used to keep me up at night, Jinyoung. Listening to them watch episodes of shows that you were in, their gasps, their laughter, the happiness they found from seeing you. You were all they needed and you were  _ gone,”  _ he seethes, voice breaking. “They needed you and you left them like they weren’t anything, like they meant nothing to you—“

Jinyoung gasps again. _“Jaebum—“_

“And for what? You left them for what? Money? Fame? Glory? What was it, Jinyoung? What was so important to you that you left them like stray animals?”

Silence falls then, of the most deafening kind. The light turns yellow, then red, the rest of the world spinning on beyond them, oblivious to the tragedy unfolding in the tiny space of a lone vehicle on an empty, rain soaked road. Jaebum feels his fingertips digging bruises into the skin of his own chest while Jinyoung stares at him, bathed in the red glow of the light, drowning in the blood Jaebum had always seen in his dreams.

“Peace,” he says, finally, so quietly Jaebum isn’t actually sure he spoke. “All I wanted was peace of mind.” 

“'Peace'?” Jaebum echoes, confused. Outside, headlights flood the back window as a car turns the corner; the light turns green. “Jinyoung—“

But he turns away, face wet, tears reflected in the green light. He doesn’t elaborate. “There’s a car coming, Jaebum.”

It’s as much of a dismissal as any. Jaebum sighs and grinds his teeth as he steps on the gas and keeps driving, head spinning, heart breaking. The rest of the drive is spent in the same tense silence as it started, tinged with a sadness from them both that feels almost impossible to comprehend. 

_ Peace of mind.  _ Jaebum bites his lip as he turns onto their street.  _ What could that mean?  _

When Jaebum parks the car on the curb and turns it off, there’s a split second where he sees Jinyoung looking outside at the house that he assumes must be theirs with just the tiniest hint of apprehension on his features. If there was ever a more vulnerable moment it would be now. He wonders if maybe this could have ended differently. 

As it stands, he licks his lips, so dry from anxiety and the constant, absentminded chewing between his teeth and takes a breath. What is there to say? How can he possibly come back from what he already  _ did _ say, and how could Jinyoung? For the moment they are suspended in the cab with Jinyoung looking out the window, separated from the thirteen year ghosts that haunted the pages of his own history book, Jaebum feels unsure. As though the fork in the road in which they’ve arrive has suddenly shattered apart and all he has to make sense of where they go from here is broken glass. And so he has to wonder. Is something like this even fixable?

He inhales. “I—“

Hand on the door, Jinyoung doesn’t look at him when he interrupts. His eyes haven’t moved from the outer walls of the house since they arrived a few quiet minutes ago, but now he’s staring at the dashboard like it will give him all the answers to every secret the universe has hidden. 

“Don’t. Don’t talk to me unless you absolutely have to.” his breath shudders when he tries to draw one in as he opens the door and goes to step out, turned, halved in shadow. “We will get Yugyeom back, Jaebum. We will. And after we do, I never,  _ ever _ want to see you again.”

Without giving Jaebum the opportunity to respond, he slips from the car and slams the door behind him, leaving Jaebum shut up in a familiar silence. After a moment of consideration, he makes to follow, wondering if the idea of losing Jinyoung for a third and final time will 

ever hurt less than this; he watches Jinyoung’s shoulders stiffen as Jaebum steps behind him and reaches around to punch the numbers into the keypad by the door. Jinyoung shivers involuntarily and it makes Jaebum close his eyes in tiny defeat when the door beeps open and Jinyoung quickly steps away to go inside. 

The yard is empty and the house dark, although he knows they’re awake. The stone path leading up to the door is cast in shadow from the walls and the trees, looking much more eerie than it ever has, and Jaebum wonders if it’s just the influence of the atmosphere. Regardless, he can tell Jinyoung seems a little unsure, so he gently grabs his arm to pull him back. 

Jinyoung steps back but quickly yanks his arm out of Jaebum’s grip. “What?” he whispers harshly. 

“Let me go first.”

Jinyoung rolls his eyes and looks like he wants to scoff  _ sure, whatever,  _ at him, but he just takes a deep breath and nods to urge him forward. Jaebum would feel good about the way that Jinyoung steps close to his back now that there’s no one behind him like he’s seeking out the protection he once needed, but his nerves are numbed to everything but the raw scraping of Yugyeom’s absence.

When they enter the house and go up the stairs, Jaebum has to resist the urge to run up the rest of the way and to them, to tear the house apart, to fall down and cry at their feet for something he knows, in the heart of his hearts, is his fault. There’s the soft glow of one of the living room lamps on, their soft voices beneath it, the rest of the house cast in shadows like mourning. 

“I don’t think he’d agree with—shh, I think hyung is here,” Youngjae says, when the door audibly closes. The rest of their voices fade as Jaebum steps onto the landing and into the light, Jinyoung one step behind. 

Then there is silence. Four pairs of eyes focus behind him when there’s the sound of a second pair of shoes on the hardwood floor. Four pairs of eyes widen, star struck, surprised, perhaps, he thinks, even a little bit afraid. All the noise in the world is sucked from the room like a vacuum at the syncopated drawing in of breath. The silence continues, broken only by the quiet gasp that leaves Jinyoung’s lips when he lays eyes on the boys for the first time in thirteen years. 

“Oh,” Jinyoung gasps, sounding out of breath, as though he had been punched in the stomach.  _ “Oh.”  _

As Jackson jumps to his feet and Jaebum steps aside in anticipation, his heart aches as he can’t help but think of how Yugyeom would have reacted to Jinyoung’s entrance. He can picture in his mind’s eye the way their youngest would have gasped, loudly, perhaps maybe even cried; Jaebum bites his lip hard against the pain in his chest as he is shoved aside by the four of them swarming Jinyoung, swallowed by the knowledge that their reunion is tarnished by the ragged absence. 

“Hyung,” Bambam cries, getting Jaebum’s attention. He looks over but realizes that it was directed at Jinyoung: the four of them have him wrapped up in a group hug of sorts, every inch of Jinyoung’s person being grabbed and inspected as though they’re trying to convince themselves he’s real.

It would be a lie to say that it didn’t bring him some sort of joy, anyway, regardless of who is missing, to see the way that Jinyoung tries so hard to hold out against the tears as they pull at his coat, but gives in and lets his face crumple with a joy that aches in the center. His own hands find faces, the backs of their necks. He pulls them in whatever way that he can, as though he himself isn’t convinced of the reality of them. Even Mark is crying, handsome face wet, cheeks pinked and mouth drawn down when Jinyoung wraps both arms around his neck and clings to him. 

“It’s okay, hyung,” Jinyoung says, even though it’s not. Jaebum watches with a churning in his stomach as Mark and Jinyoung cling to each other, Jinyoung’s mouth at his ear. The eye contact that Jinyoung makes with him over Mark’s shoulder is brief, and it is brutal, and he looks away quickly. “It’s okay.” 

Jackson is next: he allows himself to be swaddled in Jinyoung’s embrace, held, crying the hardest out of all of them. His voice is muffled in Jinyoung’s neck but he can pick out words here and there, stringing together a sentence to the tune of,  _ Jinyoungie I really thought you were going to die I was so scared we have missed you so much.  _ Jaebum swallows hard and looks away as the other two boys take their turns at being held by the one person who had betrayed them.

_ You betrayed them, too,  _ he thinks to himself, unhelpfully.  _ Perhaps in the worst way of all.  _

Finally the tears turn to sniffles to breathless laughs and wiped eyes. Jackson has Jinyoung’s hand in his as he guides him to the couch and ushers the other boys over, only glancing at Jaebum before looking away. Despite feeling as though he has been cut out, he joins them and stands quietly by the chair where Yugyeom had comforted him not so long ago. His heart constricts. 

“You look so good, Jinyoungie,” Jackson whines, pulling him as close as possible when they sit on the couch, Mark at Jackson’s other side and his arm slung behind both of their necks. “Even better than on TV.” 

Jinyoung laughs and wipes at his eyes. “You all got so…  _ big,”  _ he says, and points at Bambam. “Especially you. You were so small.” 

Bambam smiles at him, but it’s a little sad. “Yugyeom is even bigger, hyung. Wait until you see him.” 

“Yugyeom…” Jinyoung murmurs, trailing off. He bites his lips and looks at the floor in silence for a moment, all of them watching. Even though it feels like, for the most part, Jaebum has been ostracized from the rest of them, a man alone, he can still feel the overwhelming sense of pain that exists between all of them through their common link. Mark’s hand squeezes the back of Jinyoung’s neck as his dark eyes well up again with tears that he doesn’t try to wipe away. 

“Someone has a picture, right?” he finally says, looking up. Bambam nods and starts to pull out his phone to find one. “I miss him. I missed all of you, so much.” 

Youngjae’s voice is so small where he sits on Jinyoung’s other side. “We missed you too, hyung. So much.” 

“I know, he told me,” Jinyoung says, and squeezes Youngjae’s knee, referring to Jaebum without using his name or even acknowledging that he’s in the room despite being a few feet away. “I’m—I’m sorry I wasn’t here—“

“Don’t say sorry,” Jackson warns him. “It’s not your fault.” 

An awkward silence descends; despite it not being said outright, the implication of this being Jaebum’s fault is loud and clear in the way they all avoid looking at him. Jaebum would sigh, annoyed, but instead it just hurts because they’re right. It  _ is _ his fault. All of it. And despite the heaviness in the air that speaks to Yugyeom’s absence, there is a happiness, too, gone a bit cold in the middle, but a happiness nonetheless. He watches as Bambam passes the phone over and Jinyoung sighs so much like a forlorn father at the photo of their two youngest from a couple weeks ago, murmuring about how tall Yugyeom has gotten, and more handsome, too. The five of them laugh quietly together without him and it feels like the second worst pain he’s ever known; could he really have been so cruel as to deny them this? Perhaps they had been right, and his intentions of shielding them from him for all these years was shadowed not by his desire to protect them but some selfish need for vindication. To know that he had what Jinyoung didn’t and would die before he gave it up. Jaebum’s stomach rolls painfully and he swallows a gasp; Jinyoung is the only one who looks up at him but Jaebum is staring at their feet and doesn’t notice. Could he have been so selfish? Selfish enough to cause the domino effect in which they’ve found themselves falling?

Of course he could. He was. He  _ is.  _

And so as much as it stings to be excluded, he allows it. Jaebum stands alone to the side while the five of them scroll through Bambam’s photos and Jinyoung watches him stare a hole in the floor like it could widen enough to swallow him whole and save the rest of them from the suffering he has caused them to endure, both intentionally and not. He allows them this because he wants their forgiveness, their love; he needs their trust most of all. So he stands to the side of their reunion with his heart shattering to pieces in his chest as penance for the things he has done and what he will have to do even still. 

He closes his eyes and Jinyoung’s eyebrows furrow.  _ Mea culpa,  _ he says to himself, gritting his teeth, willing his eyes not water. He wishes he could express this to them and have them understand the weight of it. 

_ Mea máxima culpa.  _

“This is a lovely reunion,” Mark says, also glancing at Jaebum who has his eyes closed, “but we don’t have much time. We should talk about what we’re going to do.” 

“Yeah, hyung.” Youngjae says, and pauses; the silence that follows makes him open his eyes to see that all of them are looking at him. “Hyung?” 

He hadn’t realized Youngjae was addressing him. Jaebum clears his throat and blinks away the tears that had formed. “Sorry. What?”

“Are you okay?” 

_ No. Not even a little.  _

“Yes,” he lies, smoothly, although he’s sure that even Bambam could see through it. Jinyoung finally looks away from him, cheeks starting to redden. “What were you saying?”

“We need to come up with a plan,” Jackson chimes in, talking to him directly for the first time since they arrived. If Jackson is still angry at him, it’s hard to tell, but they will come into his feelings in time. “Quickly.” 

In spite of being their leader for so long, the man with the plan, Jaebum suddenly feels at a loss. 

“I—um,” he stutters and tries to cover it with a cough. “We should—well—“

“I need to call my manager,” Jinyoung says, interrupting as though Jaebum hadn’t spoken, and Jaebum makes no attempt at trying to speak again. “He needs to know what’s going on.” 

“Is that really good idea?” Youngjae asks, and he looks rightly nervous. Jaebum does think it’s a good idea, thorough, insomuch as something like that could seem good right now, but it’s all about staying quiet. “I don’t know, what if he tells—“

Jinyoung puts a gentle hand on Youngjae's neck. “It will be okay. He’ll be confused, and rightly so, but he’ll understand the urgency. He’ll be able to do damage control for me while we look for Yugyeom. Since I won’t be making many public appearances, he’ll be able to cover for me.”

“He’s right,” Jaebum says. He nods once. “It’s the best route as far as keeping Jinyoung out of the spotlight—“

“I don’t need your validation,” Jinyoung spits. In another life, his previous one, he would have never stood for the sort of disrespect he’s being shown. The boys had tried to come at him many times when they disagreed and he came down on them like a god’s hammer and with the same amount of mercy. But now he just pales, biting his lip against the flood of angry words that well up in his mouth, and takes the verbal whipping. 

After a moment of awkward silence, Jaebum sets his shoulders back and digs deep for the cold demeanor he used to have when it came to jobs. He comes up a little short but even through the agony that tears his body apart at the seams he manages to prop up an icy exterior, paper thin though it is. 

“Next step is to go back to Jinyoung’s house and search for the bugs, because it’s clear something has to have been bugged for them to find out so quickly.” Jaebum avoids looking at them for the most part, focused on the coffee table, but finds comfort in Youngjae’s face while he looks up at Jaebum and listens quietly.

“Depending on what we find,” he continues, “next step is to decipher the voice recording.”

“Is that possible?” Bambam asks; Mark nods and adds,

“They used a voice changer. How can you track that?”

Youngjae purses his lips for a moment, thinking, and takes the attention away from Jaebum enough that he can sneak a look at Jinyoung. He’s startled to see that Jinyoung is already looking at him: his expression is wiped clean, almost robotic looking, but looking at him nonetheless. Their eyes hold in a bizarre staring contest until Youngjae starts to speak and Jinyoung looks away. 

“It depends. Sometimes it’s possible, sometimes it isn’t. If I can isolate the different frequencies, I can use software to essentially re-tune those frequencies to their correct levels, which would uncover the voice. Whether or not Jinyoung hyung can pick out whose voice it is after I mess with the audio, well,” he shrugs. “We’ll just have to see.” 

“Then what?” Jinyoung asks. “If we find out who it is… what do we do?”

“Don’t worry about that,” Jaebum says. Everyone’s eyes turn to him, mostly surprised, some of them looking a little anxious. “I’ll know what to do when we get to that point. For now, let’s focus our energy in finding the bug and figuring out who it is. Okay?”

No one agrees, but no one argues, either. It seems as though they’re still willing to listen to him when it comes to planning, even if they’re angry with him. For now that’s all he can really ask for. To want more would be selfish and he has already hurt them so with the blade of his arrogance. 

“Jackson, Mark, Bambam, you should stay here,” Jaebum starts cautiously, as though he’s waiting for one of them to cut him off and voice their dissent. However, everyone’s eyes are on him, waiting for direction. This he can do. This, at least, has the aftertaste of normalcy and he clings to it like a drowning man. “Youngjae, you come with me to help me look through Jinyoung’s house. And Jinyoung—“

Clinging to Jackson’s arm, Jinyoung makes a face and interrupts with, 

“I’ll stay here.”

As deserving of the poisonous tone of his voice as he is, Jaebum has also neglected to change from the boy he’d been in their youth in some ways, and he feels his temper flare. He flicks the sides of his coat back so he can place his hands on his lean hips.

“No. You’re going to come with me.”

“I don’t want to.”

He grits his teeth. “I didn’t ask if that’s what you wanted.”

The room around them has gone silent again. The other boys seem to hold their breaths all at once, finally witnessing the break that Jaebum had caused between them as it bubbles over and starts to bleed. Jinyoung stares him down, fingers digging into Jackson’s leg; Jaebum stares back and feels his anger rise beyond where he can hold it back.

“Funny, you didn’t ask if I wanted to get killed by you, either.” 

“Jinyoung, you’re not staying here. You’re coming with me.”

“I am a grown man,” he snaps, teeth nearly bared. He had forgotten, in their time apart, what it was like when they fought: two dangerous animals, antlers locked and filed down to knife points that sink in deeper with every thrash. “You don’t tell me what to do—“

Frustrated, Jaebum runs a hand through his long hair before placing it back on his hip and chewing on his bottom lip. “If you think I’m going to let you out of my sight, you’re crazy.” 

“Why?” Jinyoung taunts, and his voice is ugly, black and poisonous. Even Mark and Jackson look surprised—as if he can sense the tensing of both their bodies like they’re preparing for a fight, he shifts on the couch. Jinyoung’s handsome mouth curls to the razor edge of a scimitar and says, “want to be able to get the drop on them and kill me first?”

Jaebum’s vision whites out with rage. He lunges for Jinyoung, both hands out to grab his sweater, but Mark jumps up and gets in between them to push Jaebum away by the chest. He tries to shove Mark out of the way, heart pounding, but Mark just grabs one of his wrists and shoves him back again, harder. 

“Don’t,” Mark says softly. Jaebum looks away from where Jackson has Jinyoung’s arms locked behind his back and is half pulled into his lap to stop him from getting up and going after him; Mark’s expression is soft, corners shaded with exhaustion and worry. “Not in front of them. This is the last thing we need right now.” 

He’s right, which only makes him feel worse about letting his temper get away from him. It didn’t happen often after Jinyoung had left: he became that man of steel, cold hearted in a certain way, exploding only when his boys had dug too deep. Now that Jinyoung is back, now that he knows everything, Jaebum feels like he’s lost sight of who he really is. 

Sighing, he twists his wrist out of Mark’s grip and steps back to run a hand down his face. The room is still quiet, and his voice is not much louder than a whisper when he addresses them all,

“Listen. This isn’t going to be easy. I have an idea, but we have to figure out who wants Jinyoung dead before I tell you what it is.”

“Why wait?” Youngjae asks, honestly curious. Jaebum’s chest feels tight at the thought of having to tell Youngjae that most of his plans for rescuing Yugyeom end in the gunfire he had so badly wanted to avoid, so he looks away from his face and lies. 

“Because it may not work, and I don’t want us to rely on an idea if it won’t work. If it doesn’t, it’s better to start from scratch than to build off an idea that holds no weight.” 

“Are you lying?” Jinyoung asks, meeting his eyes after wiggling out of Jackson’s loosened grip and standing up. “After everything you’ve done, how are any of us supposed to trust you?”

Jaebum shrugs. It hurts, god, it hurts to know that he’s right, that after everything he has done he has no right to stand here and ask for their trust, but Yugyeom’s life is depending on his lack of shame and so he continues to ask them for what they don’t have to give. 

“If you don’t, then don’t. But I’ve been in the business for years, and I know how this works. If you want to try saving him on your own,” he says, and points to the stairwell leading to the door, “then be my guest.” 

Jinyoung stares at him for a moment, expressionless. The others are frozen, waiting for him to react; it’s been so long that none of them are really sure what he’s going to do, but Jaebum can tell by the quiet relief on their faces when Jinyoung makes a disgusted noise and grabs his coat off the table where he’d discarded it that this is what they had hoped for. 

Jaebum waits quietly by the stairs as they all say their temporary goodbyes. More tears are shed, more laughter; hugs are exchanged and kisses, too. Never has he felt more disconnected from them than this and it burns him like dropping his ruined heart into the mouth of an open flame. 

As Jinyoung is hugging both Mark and Jackson, Youngjae quietly steps up to Jaebum’s side as he pulls on a sweatshirt, hair messy, boyish even in his adulthood. Jaebum finally turns to look at him full on when Youngjae’s hand finds his arm and he says, “hyung,” so quietly it’s almost inaudible. 

“Hmm?” he blinks at him. The plan he had created in his head is dangerous. Stupid. It will work, regardless of who it is that wants Jinyoung dead, but it is risky and it will end in permanent violence. He is too afraid to tell them not because he thinks it won’t work, because he doesn’t want to tell them that it will because... 

Youngjae interrupts his train of thought. “Your plan. You really have one, don’t you?”

Jaebum nods. “Yes. I always have a plan, don’t I?”

Youngjae doesn’t answer for a moment, staring at his hand on Jaebum’s arm over the dark material of his coat. “Yeah. You do, hyung. Even now.” 

He softens when he hears the undercurrent of anxiety in Youngjae’s voice. “Are you afraid?”

Youngjae shakes his head. 

“You shouldn’t be. We’ll get him back, Youngjae-yah.”

They both look over as Jinyoung finally lets go of Mark and Jackson and steps away. Youngjae says softly, “you’re going to die, aren’t you, hyung.”

It’s not a question. It scares him that Youngjae could so easily see into him, that he knows him well enough to know that a plan unspoken is one that has a most dangerous outcome. It scares him to think that what he’s going to do is so that they can have their peace. His penance. If it means he can atone for all the things he’s done then he will lay down his life quietly, and without regret. A penny, a pound. 

So he lies. 

“No, Youngjae. I’m not going to die. No one is going to die.” 

Jinyoung comes over to them, eyebrows furrowing at the look on Youngjae’s face, who hasn’t answered. 

“What’s—“

“If you say so, hyung,” Youngjae says, and leaves them both at the top of the stairs. The door opens and closes at the bottom and Jaebum sighs. 

“What did you do to him?” Jinyoung asks, quietly enough so that no one else hears him but Jaebum. 

“Nothing,” he lies, again. He puts his hand on Jinyoung’s lower back to urge him toward the stairs; Jinyoung allows himself to be guided by him for just a fleeting moment before reaching back and shoving it away.

“Let’s go.” 

  
  


*** 

  
  


By the time the three of them get back to Jinyoung’s house, the sun is starting to rise near the edges of the mountains, painting the rim of the sky a dusky, pale blue. The guards at the gate look confused, to say the least; one of them tries to question their earlier hasty exit, especially after Jinyoung had left by himself and returned, but he is waved away and sent back to the booth with a frustrated wave of Jinyoung’s hand. For all they know, the guards are bugged, too, and he is smart enough to not take his chances. 

Youngjae is more than impressed by the beauty of Jinyoung’s house. Despite the situation at hand, Jinyoung manages a soft laugh at Youngjae’s wide eyes, promising him a complete tour after they get Yugyeom back and he can bring them all over. Jaebum stands behind them as they toe off their shoes and stays silent on the matter of a reunion party at Jinyoung’s house. Jinyoung throws him a look over his shoulder but Jaebum has, for the time being, shut off his tumultuous emotions. It won’t last for long, not around Jinyoung, but it’s enough to keep him focused for now. 

_ Find Yugyeom,  _ he reminds himself, watching Youngjae take off into the house pulling various gadgets from the depths of his pockets.  _ That’s what matters now.  _

With Youngjae beeping and scanning through the house, vehemently denying both of their offers for help with wordless grunts and frantic hand waving, the two of them end up alone again in the kitchen. Jinyoung leans against the counter where Jaebum had been standing some hours ago and kissing him. 

How strange. To think that only hours ago they’d been alone here, or so they thought, touching in a way that felt like the indulgence of God’s greatest sin. Kissing Jinyoung’s mouth after missing him for so long. Feeling the warmth of his body pressed against his own, the desire to pull him inside, like it would make everything else unbreakable. And it was unfair, of course. To experience for himself what Jinyoung was experiencing with a man he thought he didn’t know but thought he recognized. He watches Jinyoung absently touch at his lips with the pads of his fingers as he looks down at the phone in his hand and largely ignores Jaebum’s presence and thinks about how, at the root of it all, this was his greatest transgression. Even if his plan had any ending other than the one he knows it will, he wonders if it would have been fixable. 

In his haze, he hadn’t realized that Jinyoung noticed him staring and looked up at him.

“Jaebum,” he says, and Jaebum blinks up at him as though he’s waking up from a dream. “What are you thinking about?” 

_ You. Violence. The smell of gunpowder and fear. Blood between my teeth. Your heart. Their hearts. The breaking. The blood, the blood, the blood.  _

“Nothing,” he lies. 

Jinyoung knows this and scoffs as he slides his phone back in his pocket. “After everything and you’re still going to lie? What’s the point?”

He blinks away the image of the final showdown with a faceless ghost, face expressionless, feeling as cold and empty as metal. “I’m not lying.” 

“I’m surprised I never realized it was really you. You always were a terrible liar, except when it got you out of trouble.” Jinyoung looks at him pointedly and he wonders if this is true or he’s only saying it to be cruel. “What are you  _ really _ thinking about right now?”

“Yugyeom.”

Jinyoung absentmindedly bites the side of his finger, head turning when they hear Youngjae mumbling to himself somewhere in the house, but turning back to him when the quiet of his searching resumes. 

“What about him?”

“That I’m going to save him.” 

There’s a moment of silence between them, eyes locked, that throbs like a fresh bruise. 

Jinyoung pulls his hand away from his mouth. “Are you going to save me, Jaebum?”

His answer is instant. Irrefutable. “Yes.”

“But you—“

Jaebum doesn’t let him finish; he doesn’t mean to say what he says, but his mouth goes before his brain can catch up and the words, though true and pulled deep from the well, come anyway, unbidden. 

“I’m sorry for everything that happened. I was blinded by—by, vengeance. The idea of it. I thought I could do it and I am sorry that I thought I could, that I would hurt them so easily out of selfishness.”

The air condenses and grows painful as Jinyoung’s face changes to one of surprised agony. The look only ricochets off the emptiness inside of him and echoes like a hollow drum as his voice shakes slightly when he finishes,

“But I will save you, Jinyoung-ah. I will always save you.”

Across from him, Jinyoung puts his hand on his chest and sucks in a painful sounding breath. “Jaebum—“

Neither of them have time to react to the confession. Youngjae’s shout of  _ yah! I got it!  _ from the other side of the house draws both of their attention away, straightening to go to him but not needing to as Youngjae comes running back into the room. He nearly slips in his socks, face flushed and eyes sparkling with a nervous excitement as he runs into Jaebum and lets the older man right him with two hands on his arms. 

“I found it,” he says breathlessly, holding out a hand with his fingers curled into his palm. The screen of his phone where it’s clutched in his other hand flashes wildly with the discovery. “It was attached to a stereo system in the room you were staying in, hyung.”

Jaebum closes his eyes for a moment in shame.  _ Of course.  _ How could he have been so stupid?

“Look,” Youngjae holds up his phone and gestures to it with his head, opening his fingers at the same time to reveal the tiny, black device. It’s no bigger than the American dimes that Mark had sometimes found in his pockets and let the younger boys keep, black and shining like the hard shell of a beetle. If you didn’t know to look for it, it would be nearly impossible to see. 

“This is crazy,” Youngjae breathes, pocketing the device. likely having jammed their signals already. He points to his phone and then around the room, “this is showing me the interrupted normal frequencies all around the house. These are  _ everywhere,”  _ he says, looking at Jinyoung. “Hyung, you really never noticed? Never saw anything?”

There’s a look on his face that is hard to describe, no longer looking at Jaebum, but somewhere in the middle distance. The hand on his chest curls to a fist over his heart before he drops it to his hip and blinks back into focus with a shake of his head. 

“No. They’re so small, right?” Jinyoung takes the device from Youngjae’s palm when he digs it out of his pocket and holds it out. Jinyoung turns it over in his fingers. “I never noticed. Even if I had, what reason would I have had to question it? It would have looked like any other piece of tech the guards might have installed to me. There’s security cameras everywhere outside, so even if they’d been big enough to notice—before this, I would have shrugged it off and moved on.”

Youngjae nods and takes the small device back from Jinyoung, depositing it in his pocket before shuffling through the kitchen with his phone out. The both of them watch as he locates an identical device, brown in color this time to match the underside of the cabinet in which it had been placed, and pulls it free. 

“And they’re camouflaged…” Youngjae starts, and pauses. He looks to Jaebum with an invisible cartoon set of gears turning above his head, eyebrows furrowed. “Hyung… that would mean…?” 

Jaebum nods, coming to the conclusion at the same time as Youngjae does. “That it was someone you knew, Jinyoung.” he looks over, Jinyoung’s face more pale than it had been before. “Someone who has been in your house.” 

“I—“ Jinyoung’s eyes widen and he swallows before starting over. “I don’t know—? So many people have been here, the guards are always here, my parents, we’ve had after-parties here—“

“Hey, hyung,” Youngjae says softly, coming over to touch his arm. Jinyoung grabs onto his wrist for comfort. “Just take it easy and think.”

“It would have to be someone I worked with, right?” he asks. “The money—the hit… it was a lot. Wasn’t it?”

Jaebum nods. “Six billion.” 

“Six billion—?” Jinyoung’s breath comes short and he leans back against the counter. “Then it has to be someone I worked with in the past. Those are the only kind of people I know who have that kind of money.” 

“Is there anyone who you have bad blood with, hyung? Anyone you might have pissed off?”

“I’m not sure,” he says, eyebrows coming together. “I’m not always the easiest person to work with. I’m sure any director or wardrobe person might tell you that. I have exes in the industry, messy breakups, guys who don’t like me, women who don’t like me either. But for someone to want me dead? And spend that kind of money? I—“ his breath comes out in a rush as he throws up his hands. “I don’t know. I have no idea.”

Youngjae pats his shoulder comfortingly and nods. “It’s okay, hyung. We’ll figure it out. Now that I have the devices, it’s just a matter of figuring out where they came from. I should be able to backtrack from there, if I can find the company.”

“What about the—the voicemail?” Jinyoung swallows hard. He glances briefly at Jaebum but then away, as if denying them both the comfort of knowing they’d experienced that together. 

“I’m going to try. It won’t be easy but I’m going to try, hyung.” 

Finally, as if he doesn’t have a choice, Jinyoung looks at Jaebum for help. “What’s next? What do we do?”

While he has no idea how to navigate the hellish storm of all of their emotions, this he can do. He gives himself a moment to think of their next couple of steps before coming to a decision, throwing his shoulders back and says,

“First, change your clothes. Pack a small bag. You’ll be staying with the boys until we get Yugyeom back. Secondly, I’m going to go upstairs and get my stuff while Youngjae collects the rest of the bugs. Then we’re going to go get your manager and bring him with us until Youngjae can either figure out the bug or fix the audio on the voicemail. Whatever comes first. Then we’ll go from there. Okay?” 

They both nod in unison, Jinyoung looking far more nervous than Youngjae does. Jaebum is proud of him: despite not being his younger brother by blood, it feels like he is, anyway, and Jaebum feels confident in the way that Youngjae has grown into this version of himself, focused and determined even in the face of something so terrifying. 

While Youngjae disappears into the house again to find the rest of the devices, Jaebum follows Jinyoung up to his bedroom and stands quietly by the door while he searches for a bag in the dusky start of the dawn filtering in through the curtains. Shadowed like this, his bed still messy and not slept in, Jaebum could pretend that nothing has changed. He could pretend that they are still the people they were yesterday, Park Jinyoung and his bodyguard Yoo Sejin. He could, for just a moment, pretend that the world was not about to crush him. 

“You’re still acting like a bodyguard,” Jinyoung says quietly, not looking at him as he neatly folds a small stack of clothes he’d brought to his bed before setting them in an expensive looking leather bag. 

“I know,” Jaebum replies. “I’m sorry.” 

“It’s nothing you should apologize for, although I don’t see the point. You don’t really have to watch me so closely anymore, do you?” 

“No,” and he shifts on his feet, suddenly feeling anxious. Wanting to sigh, he swallows it and wishes that the steely, hollow feeling he had earlier would return. “But I’m afraid.” 

This stops Jinyoung in his tracks: he drops the shirt he’d been folding, eyes wide even in the dark, as though he’s surprised by Jaebum’s confession of fear. Should he be? Jaebum thinks that the time to be surprised by his emotions has long passed. But in the circumstances in which they’ve found themselves and with the lies that he has managed to tell, he supposes that the shock is still warranted. 

“Of what?”

“Of losing him,” and by him he means Yugyeom. He pauses for a moment before continuing, “and of losing you. I’m afraid of them having to lose you a second time.”

“But you were willing to do it to them, weren’t you?” Jinyoung asks. He sounds breathless, as though he had run a great distance, only to find that the destination was even further than he had imagined. “You’ve already lost me, Jaebum. You know that. You know that, don’t you?”

“I wanted to save them from a life of not knowing,” he says, and he knows that he shouldn’t engage him like this. He knows he should stop putting himself in situations where they are alone until this ordeal is over and Yugyeom is back in their arms but old habits die hard and he is nothing short of an addict, so he continues to stand by Jinyoung’s door while he folds his shirts with shaking hands and says, “I wanted to save myself from knowing you were happy without us. Without me. It was unfair. And I will suffer with that knowledge for as long as I live. This is my punishment.”

When Jinyoung puts the last of his clothes into the bag and yanks the zipper and sighs, he sounds tired. “Jaebum—“

“But don’t punish them for my sins,” he says quietly, voice as even and chilling as the surface of a frozen lake in the deepest part of winter. “I will face judgement for what I did soon enough. They need you, Jinyoung. They’ve always needed you. Don’t punish them for my mistakes.” 

He looks confused. His dark eyebrows furrow as he grabs the straps of his bag and hauls it over his shoulder. “What do you mean? Facing judgement for your mistake? Jaebum, what does that mean?”

“What it sounds like,” he says. Youngjae calls to them from the bottom of the stairs that he’s done, so Jaebum nods in that direction as he turns halfway to leave the room. “Go downstairs and don’t leave his side. I’ll be down in a few minutes.” 

Jinyoung goes without argument, but he still looks confused; Jaebum doesn’t have an answer for anything else he might have asked, so he gladly slips into the room next door to grab his duffel bag and place it on the bed. Stripping quickly, he unbuttons his dress shirt and shoves it down into the bag, pulling out a plain t-shirt to throw on before digging for his holster. Normally he’d be more concerned about the contrast of a t-shirt with black slacks but he just pulls the holster over both shoulders and pushes the thought away, trying to focus on their next tasks and not the look on Jinyoung’s face when he had said  _ you’ve already lost me, Jaebum.  _

His heart contracts painfully and he gasps between his teeth alone in the shadows of the guest room where he had stayed. He unfolds the cloth that surrounded his gun in his bag, tucks it into the right side of the holster, and zips his bag closed to meet them back downstairs. Coat thrown over his arm, he makes sure the both of them are ready before he follows them out of Jinyoung’s house for what feels like, for him, is the last time. 

_ You’ve already lost me, Jaebum. You know that, don’t you? _

And so it is.  

  
  


*** 

 

“Stop, it’s this one.”

“Hyungs. Are you sure this is a good idea?” 

Jinyoung turns around in his seat to look at Youngjae, who has spoken for the first time since they’d left the house. He’d been too preoccupied in the backseat with his laptop open and a handful of the little recording devices that had been planted around Jinyoung’s house to notice that neither of them had been talking until now. 

“It’ll be fine. It’s better than the alternative.”

Youngjae crinkles his nose without looking up, still focused on the bugs. “Which is?”

“We tell him we’re here and something of his is bugged and then he potentiality gets hurt, too.”

He pauses, then nods. “You’re right.” 

Now Jaebum turns around, having turned the car off, and tries not to notice when Jinyoung moves away quickly so that their heads aren’t so close together. Youngjae finally looks up from where he’d been tinkering with the bottom of the device, getting it to pop open and expose a belly full of multi-colored wires.

“Youngjae, you have to pay attention, okay? We’re going to go in, get him, and bring him out. But this is a nice neighborhood and someone might see something, so we need you to be on high alert and let me know if something seems wrong.” 

“Okay,” he says, but picks up his laptop and turns it toward the both of them, waiting for Jinyoung to turn around in his seat again before he continues. “But you know I already disconnected all of his security cameras already, right?” 

Despite everything, Jaebum manages a grin. He shifts to bump fists with Youngjae who is grinning from ear to ear before turning to Jinyoung. “Ready?” 

“As ready as I’ll ever be to basically kidnap my manager, I guess.”

“Aw, c’mon,” Youngjae whines, “you’re not even a little happy about it? Like, this is like one of your movies, right?” 

Jinyoung shoots him a scathing look before getting out of the car and waiting for Jaebum on the sidewalk. He takes a moment to watch him standing there in the watery sunlight, arms crossed tight over his chest to retain heat now that he’s discarded his jacket. Youngjae makes a soft, but faked, coughing sound to get his attention.

“What?”

“You know you were never good at hiding it, right?” 

“Hiding what?” Jaebum asks warily, but he thinks he knows; Youngjae had been the one to say it, wasn’t he?  _ It was different for you because you loved him.  _ Perhaps they all had always known. Perhaps it was part of what made his initial decisions so difficult to understand. 

“That you loved him. Do you remember what I said?” 

Jaebum, still sitting in the driver’s seat with the door open, looks away from Jinyoung and down at his hands. “Yes.”

“Was I right?” 

“About which part?” 

“Having it all come back when you saw him again.” 

“It…” he stops. Is he right? Not much time has passed since their first meeting again after so many years, maybe two months at the most, but already his memory feels hazy, the events all piled up against each other and blurring together. He swallows the rest of his answer and looks up again to see Jinyoung watching him through the window, impatient and tired. 

It had come, not so much like the rush of moving water that Youngjae had predicted it would be, but like a soft wind that begins quietly at the edges of the sea like a whisper and begins to blow inward, until the gusts have become a whine, then a roar; until the roaring has lifted the saltwater up and smashed it to pieces against the rocks, with all the violence of a storm. 

So, no, it did not come back swift. It came soft, sweet, in the dark.

But it did come back. 

“Yes,” he says finally, still watching Jinyoung who is still watching him. “You were right.”

What he does not say is that it came too late, and that he has broken the fragile red thread between their hearts. He merely gets out of the car without saying anything else and goes to Jinyoung, who looks up at him just slightly like he’s going to ask what’s wrong but, at the last moment, decides not to.

He takes a deep breath instead, and Jaebum is glad when he looks away. Something about seeing the gold of the dawn breaking across his handsome face feels too painful to look at directly. 

“Let’s get this over with.”

  
  
  


Overall, practically kidnapping Jinyoung’s manager from his home while he was asleep in the early morning was both less of an event and more of a hassle than Jaebum had anticipated. Jinyoung, having been to his manager’s house countless times since the inception of their partnership, knew the layout of it like the back of his hand, even in the dusk with all of the lights turned off. He allowed Jaebum to stay less than two inches behind him, their bodies often brushing when Jinyoung would turn quickly down a hall or sidestep some grotesque sort of decoration; once Jinyoung even had to back up into Jaebum and guide him with his back to his chest over and around a pile of recording equipment. 

“What the hell is that for?” Jaebum whispered to him, met with a roll of Jinyoung’s eyes. 

“He wants to film me doing stuff for a vlog,” he said, waving away any other questions Jaebum might have had. “C’mon, this way.” 

When they had entered his shadowy bedroom, the manager in question was stripped down to just an ill fitting pair of checkerboard boxers and thrown carelessly across the entire width of his bed, which seemed impossible given its size, and yet at each point there was some body part of Jae’s hanging off the edge. Jinyoung covered his mouth to stifle a noise when they both noticed that he’d fallen asleep with his glasses on and they had been knocked askew on his face. 

Jaebum had been tasked with waking him up. He thinks it’s more so because Jinyoung found it funnier than out of any sort of common sense, having to stifle his laughter from he side of the room when Jae woke up flailing as Jaebum put a rough hand over his mouth. 

“Be quiet,” Jaebum nearly growled at him, easily catching the stray arm that swung toward him as Jae kicked himself awake. “This is life or death, and I need you to be. Fucking. Quiet. Do you understand?” 

He had finally realized who the perpetrator was: nodding, he fixed his glasses and sat up quickly when Jaebum let him go to see Jinyoung standing by the door. Jae opened his mouth, perhaps to shout or maybe call out to him, but Jinyoung quickly put a finger to his lips and shook his head.  _ Just come on,  _ he mouthed, allowing him just a few minutes to pull on his clothes before he was being hauled out of his house and shoved into the backseat of the car where Youngjae was waiting with a timid smile. 

All of his questions went ignored, to his dismay, with Jinyoung promising that everything will make sense and they’ll explain it to him later. Jae, feeling put off, merely huffed and threw himself back against his seat. 

“I can’t believe you kidnapped me in the middle of the night after being MIA for almost 24 hours and now you won’t even tell me  _ why.”  _

Now, though, they’ve all convened in the high-ceiling living room of their house, where the six of them have been living in their life away from Jinyoung. Jae’s eyes had widened behind the coke bottle lenses of his glasses and even as he sits on the couch between two strangers, he glances around at all the fancy tech littered throughout the visible space. 

“Okay,” he breathes, putting his hands on his knees. He takes a nervous glance around at everyone, looking at Jaebum with an unbuckled gun holster loose on his shoulders especially warily, before looking at Jinyoung. “Are you going to tell me what the  _ hell  _ is going on now?”

Jinyoung looks to one of the boys for help. “Where do I start?” 

“How much does he need to know?” Mark asks, shrugging when Jae shoots him a dirty look. “I don’t know you, so  _ I’m _ not going to tell you anything.”

With a sigh, Jinyoung runs a hand through his hair and turns halfway to Jaebum, looking as though asking him is his absolute last resort and he’s bothered by having to do it. “What do you think?”

“Just tell him what’s important.”

“Like?”

“How you know these people, maybe?” Jae suggests. “And then continuing into why you kidnapped me out of my house and made your bodyguard do it? And why this guy,” he jabs a thumb in Youngjae’s direction, who is sitting away from them all in the kitchen bent over the computer with a large pair of headphones on, “was diddling around a fancy laptop that conveniently shut down all my security cameras?”

“These are my…” Jinyoung falters for a moment, flushing slightly pink in embarrassment before he continues, “this is my family.”

To say that Jae looks utterly confused would be putting it lightly. Jaebum thinks this conversation could go a lot faster, but he’s sure that having to uncover a history he had tried so hard to bury for his manager might be a little traumatic, so he only sits quietly in one of the chairs and fiddles with one of the rings on his fingers. 

“Your family—? Your parents aren’t here, though, and your sisters—?” 

“Adopted,” Jinyoung says softly. “I was adopted when I came to the city at 18. These people… I grew up with them in one of the bad neighborhoods on the outskirts. We’ve all basically known each other since birth, almost.” he nods in Jaebum’s direction with his head but doesn’t look over, “I’ve known him the longest. We were neighbors.”

“You’ve known Sejin your whole life—? Then how come you always complained to me that he was so cold to you and that you wished he’d open up more, and that you—“

Jinyoung, reddening further, quickly cuts him off. “His name isn’t Sejin. It’s Jaebum. He lied about his identity and was acting as my bodyguard.” 

“And you didn’t notice it was him?” Jae barks a laugh at him. “You’re so unobservant.”

“Ha, ha,” Jinyoung sneers. “Anyway—“

“Wait, why would he lie? Why would he just be  _ acting _ like your bodyguard?” Finally, an air of nervousness creeps over Jae’s features, and his brows furrow in concern. “Jinyoungie, did something bad happen? What’s going on?”

He sighs. Jinyoung doesn’t answer right away, deciding to sit on the arm of the chair that Jackson is sitting on, arm along the back. “This is where it gets complicated, hyung.”

_ Hyung.  _ It strikes Jaebum then, completely out of nowhere, that Jinyoung has not called him hyung since he had revealed who he really was. It hurts in a strange way. 

“Someone… someone wants me dead. hyung. They took out a hit on me. These guys,” he gestures vaguely to everyone in the room, “they’re all hitmen.”

Jae’s eyes widen; it would be funny in any other circumstance how big they actually get. “They—?”

“Yes. They were hired by someone to kill me. Jaebum took the job as my bodyguard in order to get close to me. But things happened—“

“Ew, Jinyoung—“

Jinyoung blushes and picks up a throw pillow off the floor to launch at him, which gets deflected onto Bambam’s lap. “Shut up. Things happened and I found out who he really was. Someone, whoever did it, we think, had microphones planted all over my house. That’s what Youngjae was messing with when you got in the car. They heard Jaebum confessing who he was and that he didn’t want to kill me and they kidnapped our youngest as revenge.”

“There’s  _ another  _ one of you?” he asks shakily, drooping back into the couch cushions. “You’re right. This is very complicated. And confusing.” 

“We know. So now, Youngjae is trying to pick apart the bugs to see where they came from, and trying to decipher the voicemail we got left when Yugyeom was taken.”

Jae pales. “There’s a voicemail?” 

Looking equally as pale, Jackson pulls his phone from his pocket and taps through it for a moment before laying it down on the coffee table. 

After a moment, the mechanical recording starts:

“WE KNOW THE CONTRACT HAS BEEN BROKEN. PARK JINYOUNG MUST DIE OR BE DELIVERED TO US IN 72 HOURS OR THE HOSTAGE WILL DIE INSTEAD.”

There’s an awful silence as Jae takes a frightened, ragged breath. “What the—“

The rest of the voicemail is about to continue, but Jaebum looks over just in time to see Youngjae jump out of the stool and nearly shove the headphones off of his ears. “Wait! Wait! Turn it off!”

Scrambling, Mark reaches for the phone and quiets it before the sounds of fists landing somewhere on Yugyeom’s body can traumatize them all a second time. Every head turns in Youngjae’s direction as he excitedly swipes his laptop off the counter and slides his way into the living room, setting it down on the glass tabletop and standing beside it proudly. 

“Firstly, the bugs didn’t get me anywhere. There was some company name, Sun Corp, on the back of the inside pieces, but nothing came up as I was searching it. It must be some really secret intelligence company overseas, and after looking and looking I couldn’t find anything, so I decided to work on the voicemail instead. It was so  _ hard _ —whatever software they used, it was crazy encrypted. It might be from the same place as the bugs, if this person has access to it, but I managed to locate all the layers of audio they embedded and was able to rescale them back to normal wavelengths.” 

Nobody says anything: most of them out of shock, but also because most of Youngjae’s tech talk goes entirely over their heads. Including Jaebum’s.

“So?” Bambam asks, looking cautiously eager. “What does that mean?”

“It means that I think I managed to make the voice on the recording sound normal.” he turns to Jinyoung, the whole room balanced precariously on the hair-thin silence. “But I don’t know if you’re going to be able to recognize the voice, hyung. I’ve gotten it to sound normal, but—“

The weight of what this means seems to hit him like a pendulum on the down swing. Jinyoung swallows. “Just—just play it.”

Nodding, Youngjae still looks to Jaebum, more so for unspoken encouragement than permission. Jaebum, who feels equally as queasy as the rest of them at the thought they may be on the verge of discovering just who wants Jinyoung dead, only gives him a curt nod.

With a deep breath Youngjae drops to his knees in front of his laptop and hits play. 

The recording starts. The same words come through, as ominous and threatening as the first times they heard it, but no longer masked by a tinny, robotic waver. The voice is deep and masculine: someone normal, someone breathing, perhaps someone that Jinyoung has been close to, standing shoulder to shoulder with even as they plotted his demise. The tension in the air has swollen to a deadly, pregnant silence, beneath which every pair of eyes slides to Jinyoung as the color drains from his face like he’s bleeding out. His thin chest beneath his shirt appears to cave in as he draws in a breath so ragged and broken it feels physical. The voice sounds familiar to Jaebum, somehow—he isn’t sure, if maybe he’s just projecting, or if he really does remember hearing some of these words out loud in a voice somewhere—

“Hyung—oh, hyung!”

Bambam jumping to his feet and shouting snaps Jaebum from the rabbit hole he’d been about to chase his memories down. Jackson is on his feet, too, bent over the chair and grabbing at the front of Jinyoung’s shirt to pull him up where he’d slid off as he fainted. Jae’s own expression has turned to stone and he stares off into the middle distance as Jaebum’s heart starts to pound painfully in his chest, skirting around Youngjae still kneeling on the floor as Jaebum helps Jackson pick Jinyoung up. 

“Jinyoung,” Jaebum says, shaking him a bit, terrified by the utter white of Jinyoung’s expression, eyes rolled back in his head. “Jinyoung!”

“Go get some water,” Jackson says to Mark, who immediately disappears into the kitchen. “Jinyoung?”

Jaebum shakes him again, less gently than before, but it seems to bring him back: he gasps, sweat on his hairline, eyes wide and scared as he grabs at the front of Jaebum’s t-shirt with one hand. 

“Jinyoung, talk to me,” he pleads, hating so much that it came to this, hating every single second of pain that any of them having to endure, hating to know that all of it has been caused by him in some way or another. 

“I—“ Jinyoung starts, then stops; he doesn’t let go of Jaebum’s shirt but sits up a little in his arms so that his shoulder rests against the breadth of his chest. He looks to Jae, who hasn’t moved or even seemed to breathe since the fixed recording had played. “Hyung.”

“I can’t believe it,” he says. His face is stony and his fingers dig into his jeans where they curl on his knees. “That fucking—“

Jinyoung inhales shortly, painfully. “You know who it is, too, don’t you, hyung?” 

Jae finally looks over. There’s a sorrow beneath the anger, as though he, too, is accepting the blame for this in some way. “Jinyoung, I’m so sorry.” 

“Do you know who it is, hyung?” Youngjae asks quietly, and the room once again collapses into a tense silence as Jinyoung closes his eyes. 

Finally, after a long time of ragged breathing that has his chest expanding into Jaebum’s and a thudding against the thinness of his chest so dangerously rapid Jaebum can see it in the hollow of his throat, Jinyoung opens his eyes. 

They’re wet with tears. 

“Yes. I know who it is.” 

 

 


	13. 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm not gonna keep you by the phone, dear,  
> hang up when you've had enough, too much to talk 
> 
> [**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSOl7lYSE3c)

 

The room falls into a hush unlike any other that any of them had ever heard. Jinyoung greedily drinks the ice water that Mark brings him; his hands shake so badly that the ice rattling against the glass sounds like an avalanche in the guttural silence that has overtaken their living room. His skin, and Jae’s, where he sits on the couch with his head in his hands, is a matching shade of deathly, awful pale. Jaebum won’t push the issue, seeing how afraid Jinyoung is, but every second that passes is a second wasted. His skin itches with the need to do something. Anything. 

The ragged breath that Jinyoung takes when he finishes the ice water is audible. “It’s—“

Before he can finish, Jae looks up and angrily slams his closed fists against his knees. Through his teeth and unshed tears he looks at Jinyoung and says,

“Jinyoungie, I’m so sorry. I should have known—I should have, I don’t know, I should have seen it, I should have been paying attention—“

“Hyung, no, it’s not your fault,” he says, crying openly; Jaebum wonders if this is from the fear or seeing the guilt so visible like an open wound across his manager’s face. His shoulders shift against his chest as Jinyoung plants his elbow against Jaebum’s hip and adjusts to his knees and away from his grip. Jaebum lets him go easily with his hands falling uselessly to his sides.

Jae suddenly pushes himself off the couch. He turns like he’s going to run off, but being in an unfamiliar house, he makes a frustrated noise when he realizes he doesn’t know where to go. 

“I just—“ he starts, and stops. Everyone watches him with their breath held before he wipes an arm across his eyes and sees the sliding glass door to the patio, the same one where Jaebum had been standing on the morning that had started this stone rolling. Without finishing his sentence, Jae stalks off toward and it and disappears outside to take a moment to himself. 

All that’s left after is the way Jinyoung slumps into himself, tears making tracks on the reddened skin of his cheeks. 

“Hyung,” Youngjae says softly, like he’s afraid to talk too loudly. “Hyung, you have to tell us who it is.” 

He stands shakily. Jaebum, still on his knees where Jinyoung had dropped, wants so badly to help him. But he knows that Jinyoung would never allow that, even now. Despite the small ways in which Jinyoung had sought out the security of him, his pride, like Jaebum’s, is too great. Jaebum grits his teeth and stares at his shoes instead. 

“It’s—it’s Hyunwoo,” he says quietly. Jaebum’s head snaps up to see Jinyoung turned half way and looking down at him, the most awful expression on his face, like there’s a knife stuck hilt deep in his belly. His face crumples as he repeats it like he can’t understand it. “Hyunwoo, it was Hyunwoo, he did this—“

And even as he says it, Jaebum realizes that he  _ had  _ heard that voice: only briefly, but he had, and the fact that he hadn’t placed it until Jinyoung said it makes him angry in a way he can’t describe. Mostly at himself—should he not have been the first suspect? Why hadn’t Jaebum immediately drawn the conclusion that Hyunwoo was to blame for this, the most likely of them all to be the culprit? God, he had been so blinded by it all. He had allowed himself and his better senses to be eclipsed by Jinyoung and the rebirth of whatever it is that exists between them. 

Suddenly Jinyoung is swaying on his feet; before he can react, Jackson is up off the couch and grabbing Jinyoung by the top of the arm and pulling him toward the stairs. He mutters quickly under his breath to a shaking Jinyoung that only nods and collapses into him. When Jaebum gets up to follow, he is stopped with a quick gesture from Jackson and nothing else. The door to Jackson’s room at the far end of the mezzanine slams audibly in the quiet of the house. 

“Who is Hyunwoo?” Mark asks, and Jaebum is grateful for the question, as it gives him something to focus on. Jaebum takes a deep breath and sits heavily on one of the empty chairs by the couch. 

“His old bodyguard.”

“The one before you? Or older than that?” 

“Before me. He…” Jaebum trails off for a second, remembering the way it had felt to see him for the first time, the last barrier between himself and the thirteen years in which Jinyoung had been hidden from him. He takes a breath and runs a hand over his face before continuing, “he met me at the house the first day I got there. Showed me around and talked to me a little bit before he left.” 

Bambam’s eyebrows furrow. “He didn’t interview you?”

Jaebum shakes his head. Even then he had thought that was weird, but how could he have ever guessed that Hyunwoo would be the one wanting Jinyoung’s head? He had attributed his lack of interviewing down to a desire to leave; Hyunwoo himself even said that he had been doing it so long that Jaebum’s application, though fake, was good enough. Should that have been a red flag? It’s so hard to say. Perhaps it should have. But Jaebum stares at the carpet between the gleaming leather of his shoes and remembers the way that he had felt when Hyunwoo stepped out of the booth and into the light, so tall and square and handsome. There was a softness to him, apparent in the way he talked about Jinyoung from the deepest well of his heart, a gentleness in the way he held Jinyoung in front of him. And from then on, Jaebum had been so preoccupied by Jinyoung’s existence and the possibility of his discovery that Hyunwoo had all but left his mind. 

Mark says quietly, “you can’t blame yourself for not knowing.”

Jaebum looks up at him, blinking. He would be surprised, but Mark has always just intrinsically known what he’s thinking by the look on his face. And he does blame himself. Crimes of this nature were most often committed by the closest person to the victims, were they not? And yet the one person he had not suspected in the least, the person who admitted openly to loving Jinyoung in a way that wasn’t mutual, had the easiest access to him and his home, his things… Jaebum hadn’t even considered him. He had taken his story of moving across the ocean for a better life away from the pain of living at face value and hadn’t once even considered it. 

He doesn’t reply to this, though. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of him first. I— when I first arrived, he pretty much told me right away that the reason he was leaving and needed a replacement is because he was—he was in love with Jinyoung—“

The three of them left in the living room gasp at this; in any other circumstance it would have been comical, but not this one. How badly he wishes the circumstances were different.

“And that he took a job in America to get away from him. I don’t—he seemed so earnest. He was so sincere. I could see the heartsickness on his face, true, but—“ he chokes a little, the broiling of his own heartsickness ever present. “But he didn’t seem malicious. It seemed pained, of course. But never dangerous.”

Youngjae and Mark share a look before they both blow out a heavy breath in unison. “That’s so—“

Upstairs, the door slams heavily against the wall, starting all of them out of their conversation. Jaebum is on his feet in an instant, reaching for the gun loose by his side in its unbuckled holster, but drops his hand when he sees Jackson standing at the top of the stairs looking a strange combination of angry and anxious.

He points a finger at Jaebum while his other hand grips the railing of the metal banister. Even from where he’s standing Jaebum can see the white of his knuckles. “He wants to see you.” 

Jaebum swallows and sits up straight. “Me?”

“Yes,” he spits, but Jaebum is unsure where his anger is really being directed. He hasn’t forgiven him, he knows, but the way he nearly stomps down the stairs seems as though it’s coming from somewhere else. 

They meet near the kitchen as Jaebum warily heads up to Jackson’s room. He intends on passing by without saying anything, but Jackson grabs his bicep hard and stops him in his tracks with his voice lowered to a threat. 

“You better fix this, Jaebum,” he says, and the dropped formality adds to the way his tone makes fear shoot down Jaebum’s back. “Fix it. Save Yugyeom, save him,” he tosses his head in the direction of his room, “and fix this.” 

With a slight shove he lets go of him and keeps going into the living room, where he’s met by Mark’s hand seeking out his and Jaebum turns away. 

His heart does something strange on the way to Jackson’s room, beating rapidly in the pulse point of his throat so hard he thinks it might be visible. When he arrives in Jackson’s doorway, he does not enter right away; instead, he takes in the sight of Jinyoung sitting on the edge of Jackson’s massive four post bed, imbued in a sticky, amber light from the only lamp on in the entire room. The hardwood floors look wet in the glow. 

Jaebum wants to go to him. He wants to drop to his knees between Jinyoung’s legs and grip his face, raise it from where it’s angled at the floor, his features hidden in shadow, and wipe the tears from his cheeks with the pads of his thumbs and promise it will all be okay. The deepest, most primal, the most terrible of all his desires, finally clawed their way to the surface from the graves he had so desperately tried to bury them in. 

But he doesn’t. He stands in the doorway with the material of his thin t-shirt sticking to his back with a nervous sweat along the lines of the holster tight to his skin. He watches quietly with his heart breaking evermore as Jinyoung cries quietly into his hands when he raises them to his face. 

How did it come to this? How did he ever let it come to this? The guilt could kill him. 

And it just might.

Finally, as if sensing Jaebum in the doorway, Jinyoung swallows on a sob and leans up out of his hands. 

“Jaebum,” he says, voice hoarse, but doesn’t follow up with anything. Part of him wonders if Jinyoung is just searching for the security of the name, but he won’t ask. He wonders vaguely if the name, his true one, brings any feeling like that for him as it once had; if he associates the safety with Sejin and the danger of truth with himself. He stays quiet and watches Jinyoung watch him. 

In barely a whisper, 

“Come here.”

And he is compelled forward by some heavenly force, unable to resist him, especially like this. Jaebum comes to stand between his knees, but no closer. He doesn’t lower himself to the floor to hold him, no matter how badly he wants to do so. Jinyoung looks up at him and blinks in the soft light. 

For a moment, all they do is look at each other. Even in the warmth of the lamplight Jaebum can tell his face is pale, cheeks red, skin stained with the salt of dried tears and shining delicately with fresh ones that leak from the corners of his bloodshot eyes. He thinks of the night Jinyoung left, how he had cried then, too, an incident so strange to him that he would see it often in his dreams for years to come. He wonders how many times Jinyoung had dreamt of it, if he ever did; if he ever even thought of that night after he had settled into a new life. 

His eyes are dark, and deceptive in the depth of them. They are utter black like the universe, the deep center of them so captivating that he can’t help but allow himself to be pulled in by it. His lungs starts to hurt, irrecoverably wandering further and further in until he has lost himself in the remoteness of them, the man who fell to earth. He tumbles through the expanding universes of Jinyoung’s eyes until his emotion, raw and aching, has been reflected in the mirror of his soul. 

_ Fix it,  _ Jackson had said, in a voice with no room for alternatives.  _ Save him, and fix this. _

Without thinking, Jaebum reaches out to cup Jinyoung’s cheek in his palm. Their eye contact doesn’t break as he gently runs his thumb along the length of Jinyoung’s tear-slick cheek and allows the water to run down to his wrist. Jinyoung merely blinks; his eyes begin to water once more as he wraps his slender fingers around the damp skin of Jaebum’s exposed wrist, but he does not push away his hand like he thought he might. 

“Jinyoung,” he says, his voice as soft as a kiss in the dark. “I’m going to save him. I will fix this.” 

And Jinyoung leans into his palm, fingertips digging into his flesh, turning into the bluntness of his fingernails that send a sharp pain shooting up his elbow but he does not flinch away. Jinyoung’s eyes shutter closed on more tears that drip along Jaebum’s hand like the promise of more rain, preparing to push him away. 

Oh, Jaebum,” he says quietly. His voice breaks. “You  _ can’t.”  _

He thinks again of his plan but does not say it. Where he had been worried once that it wouldn’t work without spoiling the ending, he now realizes that, with the revelation of it being Hyunwoo, it could have not worked out better in the plan’s favor. Jinyoung may think he knows what he means, but he doesn’t. None of them do. And it is the silence of his sacrifice that he hopes will speak the loudest when he’s gone.

When the crescent moons of Jinyoung’s nails threaten to break the delicate skin of his wrist and well with blood, he finally pushes Jaebum away. He moves very little; he doesn’t step back and lets his arm fall limply to his side to stand there as Jinyoung opens his eyes and stares at the center of his throat. Whatever moment they had shared as they gazed into the infinitum of each other’s eyes, it had broken like all the rest. 

“I meant what I said, Jaebum.” 

He puts his hands in his pockets, afraid that Jinyoung might see them shake. “When?”

Jinyoung looks up at him, once again meeting his eyes. They are still shining with tears, but whatever emotion he had allowed Jaebum to see inside of them just moments ago is gone; they are now lifeless and cold like a void. 

“When I was getting out of the car. We’re going to save him. And after that, I never want to see you again.” 

He won’t deny that it hurts. He thinks it will always hurt, the type of wound that just won’t heal. It’s like Jinyoung had fitted a knife between the slats of his ribs and leans on it with every word. And it hurts even worse when Jinyoung accepts the split second of comfort he is offered against Jaebum’s better judgment and still turns him away. 

What can he do besides accept the punishment? What defense does he have? It doesn’t matter, anyway, in the end. He wishes that he could tell Jinyoung this in a way that won’t reveal his plan, but there is nothing to be said. Instead, he just nods and wonders for what reason Jinyoung could have called him in here to see him alone, if it was not just to hammer in the reminder of just how far they had split apart. 

“Don’t worry,” he says, and meets Jinyoung’s gaze head on. “You won’t.” 

“I still want to see them, though. You know that, don’t you?”

That was a given. At the end of this, he will need them all more than he could have possibly imagined, anyway, and his sentiment is for the best. 

Instead of dignifying that with an answer behind a curt nod, he just blinks and looks away. “Why did you call me in here?” 

Jinyoung’s brows furrow. He wipes his cheek with the back of his hand roughly. “I—I don’t know…”

He can tell he’s about to continue, likely coming up with some excuse in the silence, and this is something that Jaebum wants so badly to understand but won’t push. Why has he requested Jaebum specifically? If it was for his leadership and his advice about what to do next, why hasn’t he asked for it? Why did he say he didn’t know? But, it doesn’t matter. He won’t allow it to matter. Jinyoung has made his point clear and, regardless of the reason he had called him into the room, this is the way Jaebum will let it stay. 

Before he can, though, there’s a clamor downstairs. There’s the faint ringing of someone’s phone before it’s followed by a shout, then another, until all of them are shouting over each other to the point that the chaos isn’t even audible. Their eyes meet briefly, matching in their wideness. Jaebum doesn’t wait for Jinyoung to follow when he turns quickly on his heel and rushes back down to the living room where they’re all crowded around Youngjae and the laptop. 

“What’s going on?”

Jackson’s face is pale, now matching that of Jae’s and Jinyoung’s. “They—he sent another message. Listen.” 

There’s a moment of heavy silence as Youngjae hits play. Then: 

“PARK JINYOUNG MUST DIE OR BE DELIVERED TO US IN 60 HOURS OR THE HOSTAGE WILL DIE INSTEAD.” The voice is mechanical again, robotic, hidden by whatever software they had used the first time, and Jaebum takes this to mean that they don’t know they’ve found out who it is. It would comfort him, if it could, but it doesn’t.

Jinyoung opens his mouth to say something but Jackson shakes his head right before the next part of the new message comes: 

“28.79851.138.31637.”

A pause, a click. Then more:

“PARK JINYOUNG IS TO BE DELIVERED ALONE BY THE BODYGUARD. ANYONE ELSE PRESENT WILL HE SHOT ON SIGHT. DO NOT TAKE YOUR CHANCES.”

The recording clicks off and Bambam shivers violently. “Fuck, that’s so creepy. Even though we’ve heard his real voice, just—“ he struggles to verbalize it. “Creepy.”

“What the hell do those numbers mean?” Mark asks, blinking hard, a habit of his when he’s thinking in overdrive. “Jinyoungie, any significance to you? Do they maybe mean something between you both?”

“I don’t know,” he says, once again wiping across his eyes with his sleeve. Jackson hands him a piece of paper where one of them had hastily scribbled the numbers as they were said and he studies it with his thick brows furrowed. He finally drops it and sighs. “I honestly have no idea what these mean. They’re not birthdays or dates…”

Jaebum looks at Youngjae, who is holding the laptop under one hand and clicking furiously with the other. “Youngjae. Have you been able to track where the call is coming from?”

He shakes his head, looking embarrassed; he shouldn’t be, but it makes Jaebum’s heart feel funny that he would be so worried about something so trivial in the grand scheme of things. “I tried, but it’s impossible. I don’t know how they’re doing it, but they’ve completely blocked their signal, wherever they are.”

“Dammit!” Jackson shouts suddenly, kicking the leg of the coffee table so hard that the empty glass falls to its side and rolls off with a soft noise to the rug underneath. He pulls at his hair in frustration. “We’re running out of time!” 

“Jackson,” Jaebum warns, and isn’t shocked when his face turns red in anger at the admonishment. “We’re trying, we’re doing everything we can, we need to stay calm and focused—“

“If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t even be here!” he shouts; Jaebum knows that he’s just terrified and taking it out on him, but he won’t deny that the accusation still hurts. “God, if you hadn’t don’t whatever it is you did all those years ago to make him leave—“

“Yah!” Jaebum shouts over him. The other accusations he will accept as his punishment for the pain he has put them through these last few months and the agony of their situation now, but this he won’t allow. Jinyoung had left them of his own will and for it, he won’t take the blame. “Don’t blame that on me! Now is  _ not  _ the time! You—“

“Guys, don’t fight—“ Youngjae pleads, sounding so much like a kid caught between parents. He closes his laptop and anxiously runs a hand through his hair. “We need to stick together—“

Incredulous, Jinyoung makes a choked off noise that gathers everyone’s attention. When Jaebum looks back at him, his eyes are wide and fixed right on him with an unreadable expression. 

“Is that what you think? That I left because of  _ you?”  _

Jaebum swallows. Suddenly confronted with the possibility of finding out exactly what made Jinyoung leave their lives so long ago, he is no longer sure if he wants to know. 

“I don’t know what to think, Jinyoung. None of us did. You left in the middle of the night with nothing. We were bound to come up with theories.” 

Jinyoung’s face turns red with anger. “With nothing? With nothing, Jaebum? You were there that night, too, weren’t you? I kissed you goodbye, how could you say that was nothing—?” 

Bambam and Youngjae gasp in unison. Mark’s face is still and Jackson breathes, “ _ what?” _

“And the letter. You call that nothing?” he says, his eyes darting to the looks of naked shock on everyone’s faces before looking back at him.

Jaebum’s heart plummets into his stomach. He had never told them about the letter, that useless piece of paper made up of two harsh lines. But now Jinyoung has just exposed the truth for him and he’s afraid that this lie, too, will only nail his coffin shut. 

He huffs. “Those—those aren’t  _ reasons,  _ Jinyoung! They’re just what you did!” 

Jinyoung opens his mouth to speak, but Jackson cuts in first with his voice thinner than the edge of a razor blade:

“You knew? This whole time you knew he had left? And he left a letter?”

Jinyoung laughs humorlessly. “You hid that from them?”

God, Jaebum wants to die. He wants the floor to open up and swallow him whole right here, right now; every word that comes digs him into a deeper grave with no opportunity to dig himself back out. The other things he deserves, sure. But the accusation that he had hidden this from them? That he had some insight to Jinyoung’s leaving that he didn’t? This he will not accept. 

“You lying fucking scumbag—“ 

Quicker than anyone could have imagined, Jaebum is gritting his teeth and lunging forward to crack his open palm hard across Jackson’s cheek. The noise of it, brittle and violent, explodes in the air like a firework; there is a single heartbeat of stunned silence from them all before Jackson recovers and charges at him. 

There’s a lot of shouting that follows the scuffle. Jaebum barley hears any of it, letting Jackson fist a hand in the front of his shirt and take him down to the floor before he’s quickly dodging the punch Jackson aims at his face. He grunts as he grabs one of Jackson’s wrists; there’s a clamor as Jinyoung shouts at them to knock it off and the two youngest watch with open mouths. Never before has the division been so visible, so visceral and real like a bleeding sore. They have all fought before, and they were no strangers to fist fights, but those had always ended in apologies and patched up faces. He has a feeling as Jackson takes his nails desperately across Jaebum’s face that it won’t end that way this time.  Jaebum manages to capture one of Jackson’s wrists but does not get the other one in time to avoid the hit that lands directly in the corner of his eye socket to send his nose painfully sideways and followed by the gushing of blood. 

“Why would you hide that from us?” he howls, near tears, winding back for another punch that lands on Jaebum’s cheek this time, rocking his head back onto the hardwood where he has landed halfway off the area rug. The sound of it is a dull  _ thump  _ like the dropping of a melon and, despite hearing that sound many times as someone died by his hand, it being his own head makes him feel vaguely ill.

“Jackson, stop!” Jinyoung screams. The whole ordeal maybe lasts a minute, maybe two. It feels longer. His vision swims as blood rushes into his mouth and in reverse up his face to his eyes as he fights to stay conscious after hitting his head. Jackson seems like he’s going to go in for a killing blow, both hands around his neck, but suddenly the weight of him is gone when Mark grabs him roughly by the hair and the back of his shirt to yank him off. 

Jaebum squeezes his eyes shut and grunts into a gasp. His back bows off the ground as one hand comes up to dig into his eye, caught off guard by the amount of pain the hit had caused. Someone else’s hand fists in his now-bloodied shirt and the other smooths long hair away from his forehead. 

“Jaebum,” Jinyoung says, sounding worried, but Jaebum thinks he might just be hearing things. His low voice echoes down the corridor of his thoughts as he struggles to pull them back together and recover. “Are you okay? Please, say something—“

“Where’s Jackson?” he croaks, head throbbing, but his vision has stabilized enough that he can sit up with Jinyoung’s hand burning on the back of his neck. “Is he okay?”

“Physically?” Bambam says, hands shaking and looking pale. Jaebum frowns. “Yes, since you didn’t fight back after the slap. Mark took him upstairs to calm down. Hyung, are  _ you  _ okay?”

He nods, aware that Jinyoung is still holding him up and looking at the side of his face with some concern. God, the utter chaos of whatever their relationship is hurts worse than the lump on the back of his head where it had slammed into the hardwood. But he just allows Jinyoung to comfort him until he stands up and twists away, sniffling up blood that drains into his throat. 

“I’m fine. We don’t have time for this to happen again, so I will say it this one time—“ he makes eye contact with all of them remaining in the room, seeing Jae open the sliding door from the corner of his eye. “But I did not hide Jinyoung leaving from you. I don’t know much more than you all do. I never acted like I didn’t know why he left and did, I just… didn't. We'll discuss it more after we get Yugyeom back, and—“

“I hate to interrupt,” Jae says, blinking owlishly at them where he stands by the open door of the porch light. It’s then that Jaebum sees the person standing behind him that likely has a gun held to his back; fear blooms in his chest at the appearance of a stranger with no warning and he draws his own gun quickly even with blood on his fingers. “But we may have a problem.”

Jae, fingers laced behind his head, steps more forward into the light. If only Jaebum could get a better visual on the person, still in shadow backlit by the porchlight and not yet visible, Jaebum could could take his shot. But he won’t risk a life when it isn’t his own and he keeps his gun aimed steady as the person aims Jae forward with a shove. 

“Yeah, we sure do,” Jonghyun says, appearing in the light of the living room like a dream; he clicks the safety back on and stashes the gun back in his jacket pocket with a coy grin. Jae quickly scurries away toward Jinyoung, looking pale. “And it's how come I missed you getting your ass kicked?” 

Jaebum drops his gun where it had been aimed at him and sighs in annoyance. His left eye is sort of swollen, though not all the way shut, but the blood is quickly drying on his face and it pulls at his skin when he grimaces. Holstering his gun again, he quickly licks the blood off his teeth where it had started to stain the cracks before he speaks. 

“What are you doing here? And how did you get up to the balcony? And—“

“Whoa, whoa,” Jonghyun interrupts, hands up and palms up in a  _ slow down  _ gesture. He shakes the arms of his suit jacket back down before planting his hands on his hips. “The real question is, what the hell are  _ you  _ doing here? And with the target, no less?” 

He stutters, caught off guard by the question; how had  _ he  _ known already? Was Jaebum bugged by the company?  

Nervously, he licks his lips and tastes copper. “I—“

Jonghyun shakes his head. “Don’t bother,” he says, and gestures to the empty armchair across from them, where Jinyoung had fainted not so long ago. “Mind if I sit?”

“Go ahead, hyung,” Youngjae nervously looks in Jaebum’s direction and then away. Before anyone else has the chance to speak, Youngjae just blurts out, “he’s here because the mission failed. He decided he can’t kill Jinyoung and then Jinyoung found out who he really was.” 

Bambam slaps him hard on the arm in admonishment; Youngjae frowns at him and rubs the spot, annoyed. “What? It’s true!”

“And so instead of leaving you brought him here?”

Jaebum sighs. The blood on his face probably isn’t the best look for him to be having this conversation with a higher up, but he feels like the less attention he draws to it, the quicker the group-wide feelings over witnessing the fight will dissipate. 

“We… he knows us. We’ve known him our whole lives.”

Jonghyun’s eyebrows shoot up, although Jaebum feels like he isn’t actually all that surprised. Weirder things have happened in Jonghyun’s life. “You do? And you took the job anyway?” When Jaebum doesn’t answer, face reddening, Jonghyun’s lips curl into a smile. “That’s cold blooded, Bummie.

“However,” he continues before anyone else can, “I’m here because our systems were hacked recently. We aren’t sure when, or even how, but they were running a routine diagnostics test on the network and found...holes?” he looks at Youngjae like he’s asking for help with tech language, but Youngjae is looking at the floor. “You know what I mean. They found a breach, or whatever you call it, and someone had accessed our encrypted information. Surprisingly, though, it was only the files on all of  _ you _ that were accessed.” 

At this, those of them still in the room share a confused glance. Youngjae looks at him and asks, “just us? None of the other files were touched? What all kind of information did they gain access to?”

Jonghyun sighs and adjusts in the chair, crossing one leg over the other. “Initially, the files for the hit against Mr. Park were accessed. Once Jaebum took the job, information about him and his forged identity were attached to that file, and from there they accessed the rest of your files since they are attached to Jaebum’s.” 

“Where did they come from?”

“We don’t know,” he says, and his eyebrows furrow as he frowns. “That’s the thing, and the reason I showed up. No one is supposed to have access to those except for the few people with clearance, and they specifically only accessed files related to all of you. Our tech guys tried tracing it, but—“

Youngjae perks up and interrupts. “Did you find out where it came from?”

He shakes his head and Youngjae deflates. “No. Whoever did it, they’re smart, or they have access to tech that’s even more advanced and secretive than ours. All of our attempts to trace the location of the access came up against really elaborate firewalls our guys just couldn’t break through no matter how hard they tried. I assume something similar has happened here, if you’re all together.”

Jinyoung, who hasn’t spoken the entire time since Jonghyun had arrived by the porch, finally clears his throat. “It was my old bodyguard. Hyunwoo. He kidnapped our youngest and he has to be the one who took the hit out on me, right?”

Jonghyun shrugs. “I don’t know. Is that what you think happened?”

“What do your files say?” Jinyoung snaps back. Jonghyun’s face flashes with annoyance but Jaebum doesn’t reprimand Jinyoung: every moment they stand here arguing, is another moment wasted. Their time is slowly ticking down and Jaebum refuses to lose this game. Plus, Jonghyun sort of deserves the attitude, he thinks.

“Nothing,” Jonghyun says. “At least, it doesn’t match that.”

“What do they say, then?”

With an eye roll, an unnecessary one at that, in Jaebum’s opinion, Jonghyun digs in his pocket for a sleek, black phone. He scrolls through it for a while before he says, without looking up, 

“There’s no person attached to the hit—“

Jinyoung crosses his arms over his chest. Hotly, he interrupts:

“Well someone had to take it out, didn’t they?”

“If you’d let me  _ finish, ass, _ I’d tell you that  _ someone  _ did, but it’s not a person. It’s a company.”

Everyone’s eyebrows raise, including Jinyoung’s. 

Jaebum turns away from Jonghyun to Jinyoung. “A whole company? Jinyoung, do you know—are there any companies you don’t get along with?”

He shakes his head. “Not that I know of. Like I said, I know there’s people in the industry that don’t like me, but not enough for that. Plus, Hyunwoo, he—he worked for me, not a company. So I don’t—“

“The company is Sun Corp.”

“Sun Corp—?” Jinyoung looks utterly confused. “What the hell is that—?” 

Sun Corp. They’ve heard that before, haven’t they? Jaebum looks at Youngjae, sitting on the couch with a look on his face that says he’s thinking the exact same thing.

“Hyung,” he says, directed at Jinyoung. He’s scooted to the edge of the couch, both of his knees bouncing, most likely more from nerves than excitement. “Sun Corp is the name of the company I found on the bugs in your house, remember?” 

Jae, who had been so quiet since Jonghyun removed the gun from his back that Jaebum had almost forgotten he was there, leans around Jinyoung to chime in. “Sun Corp? I’ve never heard of that. All the intelligence stuff we use for Jinyoung’s security is through Samsung.” 

Youngjae nods. “Neither have we. And when I searched, I couldn’t find anything, no matter how hard I tried,” to Jonghyun he says, “and you haven’t either, right? Been able to find out what it is exactly?” 

He nods his head in confirmation. “Yeah, nothing. Which is crazy because of how far our reach is. You know that, Youngjae. Couldn’t tell anything about it except that it has to be some hyper secret security or intelligence company.”

Bambam stops chewing on his already too-blunt nails to agree. “That’s what Youngjae hyung found, too. Nothing except that it has to be an intelligence company.”

It’s exhausting. They have so many pieces to a puzzle where the final picture is starting to come into view but none of the pieces fit together. Mysterious numbers, Hyunwoo, a secret company, hackers, bugs. It feels like a blockbuster movie, the kind that Jaebum used to stay up late and watch over and over when he had stolen them from the stores growing up. He had pictured himself to be the main lead, dead set on vengeance, sacrificing nothing and no one to achieve it, all in the name of an honor he had only wished to know.

But in this story he’s no hero. The break he had caused in all the hearts of the only people he’s ever cared about is as stark as the dried blood that stains the skin of his face where he has yet to wash it away, wearing it like some macabre badge. 

“God, this is frustrating, isn’t it?” Jonghyun asks, his tone too light, too playful; it grates on Jaebum’s nerves but it’s hard to fault him for his casual disregard when he is not as close to this as the rest of them. He stretches and adjusts his suit before checking his watch. “Well, I should be off now. I’m glad we’re all on the same page.”

Jae mumbles something under his breath that earns him a sharp look from Jonghyun, but he acts like he hadn’t said anything and stares at the high ceiling like there’s something more interesting on it. 

“Jaebum, call me as soon as you find out anything new. Tomorrow at the office I’ll try to dig more and have the tech guys dig into the Sun Corp thing. We’ll get this figured out. Youngjae, Bambam, care to walk me out?”

They look at Jaebum for quick permission. He nods, running a hand through his hair; they’re up off the couch and walking Jonghyun out of the house through the front door this time just as Mark appears silently at the top of the stairs like a ghost.

“Was Jonghyun just here?” he asks, leaning on the rail of the mezzanine instead of coming down. If Jaebum knows him as well as he thinks he does, he knows that he won’t; he’ll get himself caught up on the important things and shut himself up in Jackson’s room once more. 

Jinyoung turns to look up at him, reaching out to Jae. “Yeah, he showed up on the balcony with a gun in Jae’s back. Does he always do that?” 

In spite of it all, Mark laughs quietly. “Sort of. Might have just been being cautious, since Jae is a stranger on our porch.”

“Some watchdog!” Jae huffs, pushing his glasses back up his nose. Jinyoung chuckles and gives him a friendly shake. 

“Jackson’s asleep,” Mark says, to all of them, but directed mostly at Jaebum. “He cried for a while, but I got his knuckles cleaned up and he ended up falling asleep.”

Jaebum nods. He feels oddly responsible for Jackson’s emotional exhaustion. In fact, when Youngjae and Bambam both come back into the room after locking the front door and looking to him for direction, he can’t help but feel responsible for all of them. He wants to sigh, but doesn’t. 

“We should all get some sleep, I think,” Jaebum suggests; he’s met with some uncomfortable shifting, but no one disagrees outright. “I know you guys don’t want to waste time, but it’s for the best.”

“Hyung is right,” and Youngjae accentuates his agreement with a yawn. “I know we’re all scared of losing valuable time, but we still have some, and we’ll be more focused if we’re rested. Plus, Jinyoung hyung, how long have you been awake?”

Startled by the question, it’s obvious by the look on his face that he isn’t quite sure. Longer than a day, perhaps; the sun has already set on them once again and plunged them into the icy darkness of a slowly fading winter. 

“I don’t know. I—“ he rubs his eyes as if the exhaustion slams into him all at once. “Too long.” 

Mark huffs, somewhere between a laugh and a scold. “You can sleep in my room, Jae,” he says, and Jinyoung’s manager blushes. “I’ll be in Jackson’s room, don’t worry.” 

“What about me?” Jinyoung says, smiling when Mark pretends to throw something at him. “It’s okay, I’ll sleep on the couch.”

Youngjae stretches and pulls at the front of his hoodie. “You don’t have to do that, hyung. Come sleep in my room.” 

Jaebum, feeling once again left out of this type of conversation, nods at them all before dismissing himself and heading upstairs to his room. 

He leaves the door cracked, not quite shut, in case someone  _ (not just Jinyoung,  _ his brain tries to pretend) wants to talk to him before they get to sleep, but he isn’t counting on it. His whole body starts to ache as he removes the holster from his shoulders and hangs it on the doorknob, gun removed and laid on the dresser across from his bed. He, too, has been awake for a long time, nearly an entire 24 hours, having been pulled through the wringer over and over with each new fight and each new discovery they made. He’s not entirely sure that he’ll be  _ able  _ to sleep, not with the way his mind is running at a thousand miles an hour, but god, he hopes he does. And he hopes, for his sake, his sleep is free of dreams. 

He steps into the bathroom attached to his room, void of everything except a sink and a mirror, mostly for form instead of function, but none of the other boys had wanted the room with the weird quarter bathroom, so he was alright with it. Plus, in times like this, it comes in handy to be able to wash up alone. 

Jaebum strips off his shirt and inspects the blood staining the stiffened collar and the drops of dark red against the stark white as it had dried. He lets it drop to the floor and leans into the mirror: he turns his head this way and that, inspecting the damage, scrunching his nose and squinting as the crusted blood in his nostrils pulls tightly at the skin and makes his eyes water. Jackson had managed to give him a black eye, concentrated more toward the inner corner and spreading over the bridge of his nose. Although he hasn’t seen it or felt it at the time, the punch that Jackson landed on his cheek opened a slice in the skin along his bone that had bled quite heavily without him noticing. 

“Jesus,” he mutters. He yanks the faucet handle to as hot as it’ll go before leaning down to scrub roughly at his face. Pain be damned. 

Jaebum leans up after using the bluntness of his nails to chip away the blood that had dried on his cheeks, nose, chin, and parts of his throat where it had run down after he stood up. He blinks water out of his eyelashes and jumps when he makes eye contact with Jinyoung in the mirror, leaning tiredly against the doorframe to the bathroom, bedroom door closed behind him. 

“You scared me,” he says quietly, heart beating rapidly from both the initial scare and, once again, that they’ve found themselves alone. Fleetingly he thinks of how he had once been so immovable but with Jinyoung’s return into their lives and everything that has happened between them, both under the pretense of a false identity and their real selves, he has become someone broken and unstable. 

“Sorry,” Jinyoung replies, but he sounds too tired to be sorry, and for that Jaebum doesn’t blame him. He casts his eyes down as he goes passed Jinyoung into his bedroom and stands there as though he’s forgotten what he was going to do. 

When Jinyoung only turns to face him and doesn’t say anything, Jaebum acts like he isn’t there and steps out of his dress pants and folds them over his arm before throwing them on the chair in the corner; where he had once felt so unnerved by the thought of doing something like this in front of him, he realizes that the time for that has long withered away and continues to change into his pajamas.

By the time Jaebum has pulled on clean sweats and sat down on the edge of his bed to take off his socks, Jinyoung still hasn’t said anything, and his silent observation of Jaebum’s nightly ritual makes him feel vaguely unsettled. 

“Are you okay?” he asks, tossing his socks on top of his pants. Jinyoung shifts so that his back is against the doorframe but doesn’t answer. Again they have come to this, alone in a room with no explanation, against Jinyoung’s constant word. “Why are you… why’d you come in here?”

“I just…” he blinks, so tired, enough that Jaebum can see the dark circles pressed like ugly black bruises under his eyes. He scrubs a hand over his face. “I don’t know. I just need to brainstorm.” 

“You said you never want to see me again,” he says quietly, aware that Jinyoung looks at him sharply, but Jaebum just looks ahead into the bathroom before meeting his gaze. “But we keep ending up alone together.”

He isn’t sure what kind of answer he is hoping for. Perhaps a  _ it was a mistake  _ or  _ maybe I was wrong _ . He steels himself for when the answer comes and it wasn’t what he wanted.

“To be fair, I said when this is over. We still have to get Yugyeom back.”

Jaebum nods; he hums but doesn’t give a response as he leans back on his hands.

“You know what you’re doing, don’t you?” Jinyoung finally says after some silence in which Jaebum had looked away. He returns his gaze to the stoicism of Jinyoung's handsome face, tired though it is. “You understand—you  _ get  _ this kind of life, don’t you?”

He shrugs. “You could say that. We’ve been doing it for thirteen years. Longer, in a sense. We grew up on the street, basically. Petty criminals since we were children. This is like that, in a way—just we have a home now. So it’s all that we know.” 

It's strange to talk about it like this––as though he hadn't been with them, as though he hadn't seen the violence that Jinyoung knew how to inflict, as though he'd never stood by his side while Jinyoung kicked in the glass of a store window or expertly wielded a knife. They feel like strangers now, and he finds himself almost mourning the boy he knew.

Jinyoung flinches a little at the mention of their childhoods, but doesn’t ask for clarification. “But you guide them.”

”In a way, I suppose.” 

Jinyoung looks like he wants to smile, but is too tired to do so. “You’ve always been their leader, Jaebum.”  _ Our leader.  _ It goes unsaid, but the undertone of it is there, balanced so precariously on the unspoken differences of the childhood they experienced together. 

“They’re their own people,” he says, ignoring it, but more so as an explanation of their development into adults than a direct disagreement. “But I have always tried to guide them, yes.”

“They’d follow you to the ends of the earth. You know that, don’t you?” 

For some reason, coupled with the look on his face, it makes Jaebum’s chest burn with pain as though Jinyoung as leaned on the blade he has placed between his ribs when he wasn’t looking. He takes a deep breath; it hurts, it hurts, it hurts. 

“After what I’ve done recently, I don’t think so. They would chase me to it and shove me off of it.”

Jinyoung laughs a little. It hadn’t exactly been a joke, but if it allowed Jinyoung to feel something other than the crushing anxiety for even just a moment, then so be it. Jaebum watches him warily, still leaned back on his hands, as Jinyoung comes over to sit on the bed behind him. 

“I can’t figure out what those numbers are,” he says, changing the subject, and for that Jaebum is grateful. He leans up off his hands and hangs them between his knees to fiddle with his rings as he feels Jinyoung lay down against the pillows and adjust. “They just don’t make any sense. I’ve been thinking about them since I heard them and just, God. It’s driving me insane.” 

Jaebum doesn’t turn around. “So they don’t mean anything? Not even individually?” 

He feels Jinyoung shake his head. “No. I really have no idea what they are. I don’t—does he expect me to know? Part of me wonders if that clue was even for me.”

“Who else would it be for?”

It takes Jinyoung a little longer to answer this time. When he does, his voice has deepened and slurred into a sleep-thick slush. 

“You, maybe. Since you’re a bodyguard. If he somehow found out about you, your past, maybe he thought you’d have some expertise like that.”

“Do you think he’s related to the Sun Corp?”

Again, a pause, longer this time. But he finally takes a deep breath and answers. “I don’t know. But he has to be, right? If the bugs were in m’house, and that company is th’one that took out th’hit, then he has to be.” 

“Somehow.”

“Mmm.” The noise is long and drawn out. “Somehow.” 

“No birthdays? Anniversaries?”

“Uh-uh.” his voice has really slurred now; Jaebum wonders if he should kick him out before he falls asleep or if Jinyoung will shuffle off on his own. “Nada. Not a phone number, nothin’. I really dunno, Jaebum.” 

It’s quiet between them for a moment. In the dim of the room, he can hear Jinyoung’s breathing as it starts to slow. He thinks Jinyoung may have fallen asleep, but then he says, almost unintelligible,

“I’ll keep thinkin’ on it. Maybe it’ll come up in a dream or somethin’.” He huffs an exhausted laugh, a single exhale of breath. “Wouldn’t that be interesting.” 

Sure, but he wouldn’t be surprised, either. His dreams have always been vivid, showing him botched memories of a past he tried too damn hard to bury, but it always came back like a dog that just won’t die. Jaebum plays absently with the rings on his fingers and considers asking Jinyoung about dreams: if he ever had any like the ones he did, splashed with blood, echoes of the night he had left, but he bites his lip and decides not to. It will be better for him if he leaves them in the end not knowing. 

Jaebum turns, mouth open to ask him something, but it’s clear that Jinyoung had fallen asleep with his fingers interlaced on his stomach. If this were another life he would have smiled and helped him sleepily undress until he was rolling over, comfortable, but as it is he merely watches the gentle rising and falling of Jinyoung’s chest under his shirt. His handsome face, so pinched with worry and flushed with a fluctuating anger over the course of the last couple of days, finally looks at peace. 

His heart hurts. It aches so badly he wishes he could just reach in and pull it out, so tired of the feeling, but unable to escape it as he admires the softness of Jinyoung’s lips as they part with a steady breath. 

How he wishes it was all different. How badly he wishes he could turn back time and start over. Would he go back to that night and convince him to stay? Would he still let him go but reveal the letter to them instead of hiding it all these years? Would he have still taken the job? Time is so fickle, his heart even more so. Every notch on the timeline is an event that shaped them in some way and changing it would cause a butterfly effect in their lives so unpredictable that he wonders if this timeline is not, as much as it’s painful, the only one that they could have ever known. If, by heavenly design, it was always meant to be this way. 

Overwhelmed with sudden emotion, Jaebum swallows the lump in his throat and stands. He goes to turn the lamp off; he stands next to it with his fingers on the chain and the other hand on the doorknob. When he turns it out and opens the door just enough to let the soft

hallway light spill the tiniest orange wedge into the dark across the handsomeness of Jinyoung’s face, Jaebum feels the last piece of his heart shatter for good. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, knowing that Jinyoung can’t hear him, but desperate to get the words out, anyway. His fingers tighten on the doorknob. “I’m sorry, Jinyoungie. I’m so sorry for all the hurt I caused. I’m sorry for—for hiding the truth from them.”

He swallows and takes a deep breath, turning to leave. With one last look at the gentleness of Jinyoung’s face in a world that Jaebum had corrupted with lies and violence, he feels his heart contract and then lie still.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t fix it, Jinyoung,” he whispers, closing the door and going to lie on the couch where he stares at the darkened ceiling until he can no longer fight the pain of being awake.

 

 


	14. 13 | Act I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's the place that's said to break  
> it's just as safe from the outside tonight
> 
>  
> 
> [**](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+lighthouse+interpol)  
> 

 

 

Dreams are funny things, indiscriminate and uncaring of desire. Jaebum had laid on the couch and hoped that he could sleep dreamlessly for once, no longer plagued by watery memories or things that felt like unsettling premonitions. He is quite tired of all his dreams being bathed in the glow of bright-red blood.

But, as his dreams constantly remind him, he who deals in death has forfeited the right to choose. 

And so he does dream on the couch, fitfully, the kaleidoscope ever changing and flashing too rapidly for him to remember any solid detail when he kicks himself awake a couple hours later. All he knows is that they were violent, and dangerous, and the remnants of them cling to him like an unspoken warning as he sits up on the couch and blinks into the gold light spilling across the hardwood floors. 

Judging by the silence, no one else is awake yet. The cold that frosts on the windows and the sliding glass door to the patio seems to seep into him and makes him shiver as he stands to stretch, but the idea of going into his room and seeing Jinyoung asleep on his bed after everything that happened makes him feel slightly ill, so instead he just briskly rubs his arms with his hands and goes into the kitchen to make some coffee.

He stands in front of the machine with his hands on the counter and his eyes closed, leaning into the warmth that radiates as the machine clicks on and starts to hum. Jaebum wonders how early it is and checks: the clock says 7:18AM, so still quite early, and he’s not surprised when no one else stirs in the bedrooms above him or in Youngjae’s room just down the hall from the kitchen. He’s also not sure just how much time had passed—despite all of them needing sleep, he’s wary about wasting the time that they don’t have, and Jaebum decides to give them all another forty minutes before he wakes them up if they don’t get up themselves.

While it’s nice to be by himself for the moment and drink a hot cup of coffee like absolutely nothing is wrong, it also gives him too much time to think, and that in itself is the most dangerous thing he could do right now. Instead of letting his thoughts wander to the man upstairs asleep on his bed, Jaebum bites his lip and tries to sort out the mess that they have only partially uncovered and where to go from here.

Leaned against the island, he stares out the kitchen window into the gold light filtered by the green leaves of outdoor plants. What do they have so far? Hyunwoo is the one who kidnapped Yugyeom and sent the voicemails. This they know for sure. A company called Sun Corp is affiliated with the hit on Jinyoung; they are also responsible for the bugs in his house and for the security breach at Knight Group. Sun Corp accessed their information, and  _ only  _ their information—what the hell could they be looking for? How are these two connected? And the numbers—the mysterious numbers in the second voicemail. What the hell are they and what do they mean?

Jaebum sighs. So many details and yet nothing to really connect them, at least for now. He had hoped their discoveries would make this easier but it seems to only have made them that much more elusive. 

He hears quiet footsteps on the floor behind him. When he turns, cup still in hand, he sees Youngjae rubbing tiredly at his mess of wild hair where it sticks up everywhere as he yawns his way through a greeting.

“Morning, hyung.” 

“Good morning. Did you sleep okay?” he hesitates for a moment. “How are you feeling?” 

Youngjae glances at him before sliding onto a barstool. “I did, yeah. I’m okay. Just scared, you know? We still don’t know where exactly Gyeom is and we’re running out of time.”

Jaebum bites his lip and nods. “I know.” 

“Hyung…” Youngjae trails off uncertainly, earning Jaebum’s attention. He avoids his eyes and watches his fingers tap the countertop instead. “The fight yesterday. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he says. He sets his cup down to gingerly press at the sensitive skin around the corner of his eye and on his nose where a dark bruise has started to form. “It hurts a little but you know I’ve had worse.

“Was anything he said true?” Youngjae asks, looking up at him. “Jinyoung hyung, I mean. Did he—did he really tell you goodbye? And did he really leave a letter?”

He sighs and leans his weight on his hands, thinking for a moment. How does he answer this in a way that’s not incriminating? The truth is that he has never lied about not knowing what happened, or where he went. He hid the letter from them, yes, but even still, he never claimed to know  _ why  _ Jinyoung left, and it’s this he hopes they can understand. 

“No, and yes. The night he—I guess it was the night he left, we met at the truck in the field. You remember that, right? The one behind our houses.”

Youngjae nods. The truck hadn’t been a secret, per se; they all knew of it, but it was also an unspoken rule that it belonged to Jaebum and Jinyoung at night, and no one else was to touch it. 

“We met there like we always did. I was standing there and waiting for him, just looking at the stars. I had my eyes closed, and then I heard him laugh, so I opened them. When I saw him…” Jaebum frowns, remembering; he had seen this scene so many times, hardly ever normal and convoluted through the psychotrope of nightmares. He almost thinks the ones where Jinyoung was nothing but a skeleton were the real memories and he struggles to recall the rest. 

“When I saw him, I could tell something was wrong. He seemed—if you looked at him for just a moment, you wouldn’t be able to tell. But I knew him. And I could tell something was wrong with him by the way he moved, by the way he wouldn’t look at me head on. I thought maybe… Maybe he just had some trouble at home. You knew how it was for him. But it felt different. And I could sense it.” 

“Did you…” Youngjae tapers off when he finds he can’t quite describe what he wanted to ask. “Was that the first time you noticed?” 

“No,” he says, and his heart aches when he thinks of the night they all graduated; the picture in his wallet that had been his downfall. “I saw it one other time the night we graduated. He had this look on his face that night when he was talking to me that I couldn’t place—but it went away and I just, I don’t know, chalked it up to nerves I guess. 

“But that night, it was so strong. Radiated off him. He was wearing a leather jacket he had lifted from some rich kid junior year; I could tell he was burning up in it because it was summer but I didn’t say anything about it. He had a hard time looking at me so I asked him what was wrong.” 

Youngjae’s voice is just a whisper, eyes wide and entranced as Jaebum tells this story out loud for the very first time in the golden dawning of his last day on Earth. 

“What did he say?”

“He asked me, ‘would you kiss me if I asked?’ and I remember my heart stopping.” He places his hand over his real heart, eyes fixed on the table, not seeing it, but the image of a smaller, skinnier, more anxious Jinyoung in front of him like it was yesterday. “I had known for a long time we were different. The two of us, I mean. That we had something different than everyone else. And I—even if I wouldn’t acknowledge it out loud, or in front of everyone, I knew it was there. And so I said to him, you want me to kiss you? The way he said yes and smiled—god, Youngjae. It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. It felt less like a smile than it did a look like someone had just stabbed him in the heart. 

“But I kissed him. I kissed him and he cried. I was scared when that happened. He said ‘oh, hyung’, and when he finally pulled away, all he did was turn around and start to run.”

“You didn’t go after him?”

Jaebum shakes his head. Should he have? He doesn’t know anymore. “No. I just let him go. I didn’t understand what had just happened. I thought, maybe he was afraid of how he felt, of getting kissed by a boy, so I just let him go. But the next day when I couldn’t find him anywhere, I went back to the truck and found the letter. All it said was,  _ Tell them this isn’t their fault. Please don’t look for me. _ And that was all there was.”

For a moment, between them there is only the heavy silence that comes with Jaebum’s stark confessional. Youngjae blinks wetly at the countertop as though he’s too afraid to look Jaebum in the eye. 

“You really didn’t know, hyung,” he says, less like a question and more like a realization. Jaebum doesn’t reply. “You really didn’t know. All this time, we all thought—we all thought you knew something we didn’t—“

Jaebum shakes his head. “I had the letter but that was all. His departure is just as much of a mystery to me as it is to all of you. Even still.”

He looks up at this, wiping his eyes with both hands. “He still hasn’t told you?”

“No, he says. Jaebum looks past him into the living room where Mark, Jackson, and Bambam have all started to slowly make their way down the stairs with Jinyoung’s manager trailing awkwardly behind. He glances at Youngjae and finishes, “and I don’t think he ever will.”

If Youngjae has a response to this, he keeps it to himself. They join the others in the living room and the silence that descends when Jackson meets Jaebum’s eyes is incredibly intense and awkward. 

He takes a deep breath, intending to diffuse it somehow, by telling Jackson not to worry about it. Before he can, though, Jackson is gripping Mark’s hand hard enough to break his fingers and saying,

“Hyung, I’m sorry.”

Dumbfounded, Jaebum’s jaw drops. “Huh?”

“I’m sorry for hitting you yesterday.” he looks at the ugly bruise across his face and sighs. “I didn’t—I just lost it. Hearing that you knew everything the whole time, I just couldn’t take it anymore. But I shouldn’t have hurt you like that.”

“For what it’s worth,” Youngjae chimes in, “he didn’t actually know either.” 

Jackson looks at him. “What do you mean?”

“Hyung just told me what really happened that night. What Jinyoung hyung said—there was a lot of missing context. But hyung told me the whole story about what happened and he didn’t know. He knew about the letter but he had no idea Jinyoung hyung was leaving.”

There’s something in Jackson’s eyes when he returns his gaze to Jaebum. It glitters, and he thinks it might be hope, but Jaebum is too scared to wish for something so good.

“You really didn’t know?”

He nods anyway, though. “I didn’t know, Jackson. I never did. And I still don’t.” 

Jackson closes his eyes and seems to deflate with an exhale of audible relief. Maybe he doesn’t completely trust Jaebum, and for this Jaebum will not hold it against him, but whatever healing they have time for, he thinks that they might be on the way there. 

“Hyung, I’m so sorry—“

“It’s okay,” he says, not wanting to get into it. The event had come and gone and he just wants to move on from it. “Let’s not—“

He’s interrupted by a shout from his bedroom up on the mezzanine. His bedroom door flies open, Jinyoung rushing out of it and nearly slipping when one socked foot slides on the hardwood as he rounds the corner. He grabs the railing of the balcony and looks at them all with messy hair and wide eyes like a cartoon mad scientist. 

“I figured it out!” he shouts, but no one reacts. When they don’t, he rolls his eyes with his entire body behind it and throws his hands up. “The numbers! I figured them out!” 

All of them who had been sitting are suddenly on their feet—shouts overlap in a clamor as Jinyoung pounds down the stairs wearing the clothes he’d fallen asleep in and nearly slips on the bottom step. He runs over, breathless, moreso with relief than anything else, if Jaebum is reading the look in his eye correctly.

“I don’t know how I didn’t realize it earlier,” he says, pulling his phone out of his pocket and bringing up the browser. He casts a glance at Jaebum that mostly goes unnoticed by everyone else; Mark seems to be the only person who had noticed just whose room Jinyoung had exited and their eye contact lasts for one curious second where Jaebum mouths  _ not now.  _

Jinyoung types the numbers in and turns his phone around to show them all where a bright red pin has been dropped on a map. Jaebum is dreadfully surprised to see that it’s uncomfortably close. 

“They’re coordinates,” Jinyoung breathes when no one says anything. “I—at first they were just nonsense. They didn’t make sense. They didn’t have any significance. But—“

“How did you figure it out, hyung?” Bambam asks, looking as nervous as the rest of them feel.

“Oddly enough, because of my time on Running Man. Do you remember the episode where we played the game where we teamed up and one person got dropped off in an area and we had to figure out how to get our team members to pick us up?” he directs this question at everyone except for Jaebum. “In that game, we figured out how to use coordinates to get around the rule that we weren’t allowed to say where we were. It seems a little useless to memorize, but last night I woke up a couple times and kept thinking about how I knew what those numbers meant, because I could  _ feel it.  _ Like I recognized the format. And then when I woke up just now it hit me.”

He sort of smiles, but it’s empty. It’s more so out of morale boosting than it is any real joy at solving this piece of the puzzle. Jaebum’s heart just…  _ aches. _

“So what now? Where does that lead us to?” Jackson asks, mirroring Bambam in the way he chews nervously on a blunt nail. “Do you know? Does it get us any further?”

Jinyoung nods. He pulls his phone back to him and uses two fingers to zoom in on the satellite map a few times; where Jaebum is standing sort of to his side, he can see as a pixelated building comes into view surrounded by the muddy brown of stretches of dirt surrounding it. If it’s not mistake, it looks like—

“A warehouse?” he asks. Jinyoung looks at him and nods again as he turns his phone back toward them. 

“It’s a warehouse, but it hasn’t been used in ages. It’s one of the abandoned ones in the industrial district that the directors get permission to enter from the city to film in.”

“Wow,” Youngjae, who hasn’t spoken this whole time, whistles lowly. “And you know this warehouse? How’s it connected to you, and him? Or is it just some random sketchy place?”

Sliding his phone back into his pocket, Jinyoung runs a shaking hand through his sleep mussed hair. 

“The first time we ever met…” he peters off and then swallows before starting again, voice a little thinner. “The first time we met was at that warehouse. I was there filming a movie, and he was working security for another one of the cast members. I was on my own goofing off with something and slipped, nearly falling through a hole in the floor to the level below, but he just happened to be watching and managed to catch the back of my shirt. We just… hit it off, I suppose. A couple weeks later he left that actor to come work for me as my head of security. He was my personal bodyguard for a while… but, when it started to get more personal, he started hiring out. 

“Now that I think about it,” he continues, with a laugh that doesn’t exactly have much humor in it, “I think he was scaring my bodyguards into quitting when he found out I slept with them. I always said it wasn’t exclusive between us, so he knew that, but the turnover rate for my personal guards…” he sighs. “Its too high to be a coincidence. Now that all of this is on the table, I think he must have been scaring them into quitting because he was jealous.”

The room is silent. 

Jae breaks it a moment later, dropping his head back against the couch to stare at the ceiling. “This gets more and more dramatic by the moment, doesn’t it?” 

In disbelief, Jinyoung laughs. “Yeah. Feels like one of my movies, huh, hyung?” 

Jae nods. “Too close for comfort, actually.” he shivers. “I would have preferred if those stayed fiction, you know?” 

“Me too.”

“Well?” Jackson asks, directed mostly at Jaebum; they still haven’t gotten past a lot of their hurdles, but he thinks that, at least for now, they can come together for this common goal and won’t fight again until it’s over. He hopes. “What now?”

Jaebum plants his hands on his hips. There’s still quite a bit of information missing, but they have, for the most part, everything that they need in order to get to Yugyeom. The only thing that scares him is the overwhelming amount of variables and he has never been the type to deal in variables. 

“We make a plan, first and foremost,” he says, straightening and pushing his long hair back off his face. “We have the location, and that’s the most important thing, because now we know where Yugyeom is.”

“You really think he’s there, hyung?” Bambam asks around the finger in his mouth where he chews nervously. “What if Hyunwoo has him somewhere else?” 

“It’s a possibility, but I don’t think that’s the case. He said in the voicemail that Jinyoung and I are to come alone, and the coordinates are where he said that Jinyoung would need to be ‘delivered’. He managed to pull off all of this, so I wouldn’t put it past him to have Yugyeom somewhere else, but I don’t think that’s the case.” Jaebum looks at Jinyoung, who is already looking at him. “What do you think?” 

He keeps staring at Jaebum for a second, an unreadable expression on his face that makes Jaebum’s insides feel weird. It’s a look he’s seen before: it’s similar to the one he’d had on the night they graduated and he had seen, for the first time, the truth of Jinyoung’s true feelings. Just as it had then, it makes him uneasy even after the look clears. 

He shakes his head. “No, I don’t think he’s somewhere else. He’s capable of it, but… I don’t think he thought it all the way through like that.”

“You don’t think so?” Mark asks. 

“No. He’s smart, yes, and he’s managed to get this far, but…” he trails off for a moment, thinking, until his eyes focus once more on Mark’s handsome face. “I think he knows that it would be his one chance to get me back. He wouldn’t be stupid enough to have Yugyeom somewhere else and risk getting killed first, or losing me. That’s the deal, right? I die and we save Yugyeom.”

Everyone pales in unison; Jaebum’s teeth grind together. “No. You’re not going to die.  _ No one  _ is going to die. Maybe him, Jinyoung, but not you, and not Yugyeom.”

He sighs and it sounds more like a breath of relief than anything else. For a moment, a brief one, Jaebum lets himself experience the pain of Jinyoung thinking that he wouldn’t hesitate to give him up for Yugyeom. Even after everything that they’ve experienced in the last couple of months, and especially the last couple of days, the fact that Jinyoung could be so unsure even for just a moment that Jaebum wouldn’t try to save him hurts like he twisted the knife between his ribs even deeper. When he takes a deep breath in, it burns. 

“It’s especially crucial that we make a detailed plan,” Jaebum says, to distract himself from the heartache and to redirect everyone’s attention. “There’s a ton of variables to plan for, and we need to plan for as many as we can think of.” his voice grows cold and serious, making eye contact with every single person in the room and holding it before moving on. “ _ No one  _ is leaving this house without going through me first. Every plan is getting approved by me. I get final say on all of your ideas. We have to work together, and we have to do it fast, because we’re running out of time. But I swear to god, we’re going to save them both, and I won’t let a goddamn thing happen to any of the rest of you.”

Spoken from behind his gritted teeth, it sounds more like a threat than a promise of their safety, but it is exactly this kind of leadership that has kept the six of them alive for the duration of their careers as underground hitmen and regardless of the utter hurricane of emotion that’s exploding through him at what feels like all times, he will not change that now. Not when it matters the most. 

“Is that clear?” 

Every head bobs up and down, every expression is serious and stoic. Though they have always understood the nature of the situation that they are in, it seems that, now that they know where to go, the  _ finality  _ of it has finally set in, and there is not an ounce of happiness in any of them. Their bodies are wound tight like springs and forcing the air in the room into brick monoliths of tension. Saving Yugyeom is no longer an if, but a when, and the nature of their task has settled like the weight of the world along all of their shoulders. 

He takes a deep breath. It is do, or it is die.

And for him it is both.

  
  


**

  
  


Much like their regular missions, Jaebum sets to splitting them up into their areas of expertise; he allows them to formulate their own plans based on their skill sets and, at the end, will gather them all together to fit them in their appropriate places like pieces of a complicated, bloody puzzle. He knows that Mark and Jackson will do everything in their power to make sure that this does not end in the firework burst of gunfire, but Jaebum also knows something they don’t. He intends to keep it that way. 

Youngjae goes back into his room with Jae to start searching for the blueprints of the warehouse while Jae does whatever he can to cover Jinyoung’s absences. They discussed it briefly before the group split into their individual divisions; they know one has to exist somewhere, as Jinyoung has both seen it and has heard directors discussing it when doing table reads or scouting locations for future pieces of script. All they need is the most current version that they can find and hope that it’s extensive enough to give them an insight into what they should be expecting when Jaebum and Jinyoung arrive and to try and guess where Hyunwoo might have Yugyeom.

Bambam eventually joins them in his room, sitting on his bed and looking over his shoulder while Youngjae starts passing through every firewall he can find to get into e-mails, databases, and archives related to the warehouse and the ones surrounding it. When he pats Jaebum on the shoulder and disappears into Youngjae’s open door, he has once again been left alone with Jinyoung, who levels him with a look. 

“And what should I be doing?” he asks, arms crossing over his chest; he’s dressed so casually, and the look makes him feel so strange.

The sight of Jinyoung just standing in their living room makes him feel strange, actually, even though he has been here for quite a while already. So many years were spent imagining him as he is now,  grown up and masculine and tangible, but more wicked and cruel than he could have ever been in actuality. Jaebum tries to blink away the layers of the Jinyoung he had created in his head and, while they have mostly been stripped away by the growing pains of their last few months together, the novelty of him standing in their living room in slim fitting jeans and a plain, long sleeved shirt where he’d been little more than an urban legend for thirteen years still makes him feel as though he can’t catch his breath. 

His face softens a bit as though he can hear what Jaebum is thinking. “Jaebum,” he says quietly, getting his attention. 

“Just prepare yourself. I––we don’t do rescue missions. Our jobs have always been about making sure we don’t get caught, and don’t get hurt in the process. We have more insight into how to take a life than to save one. We’re operating in a blind-spot and I don’t know what’s going to happen. So you need to be ready for anything.”

“Does that scare you?” 

Jinyoung just keeps staring at him and god, he wishes that Jinyoung would flinch, just this once. He’s not sure how much more of Jinyoung’s blunt probing he can stand. 

“Which part?”

“Operating in a blind-spot of sorts.”

“Yes. It scares me. I’m scared I’m going to fail and I’m going to lose one or both of you.” 

“You won’t,” he says, and he sounds so confident that Jaebum believes that he believes it. “No matter what, Jaebum, you aren’t going to lose either of us.” 

He huffs a humorless laugh; hadn’t Jinyoung just said recently that Jaebum has already lost him? In this sense he’s sure that Jinyoung means physically, but it still hurts, and it still makes him utter that little, self deprecating laugh.

“I’ve already lost  _ you,  _ haven’t I?” he asks, and this time, Jinyoung does flinch. It doesn’t satisfy him like he thought it might. “I meant physically, anyway. This is all on me. They’re planning, of course, but we’re going alone, and it’s up to me to save you both. So, yes. I’m afraid.”

If Jinyoung has any further thoughts on Jaebum losing him, he keeps them to himself. “So what are we going to do, then? Do  _ you _ have a plan at all?” 

He does, in the sense that he’s written the ending before the beginning has started, but he doesn’t say this. He crosses his arms over his bare chest and thinks for a moment before sighing,

“Sort of. There’s pieces missing, but I have some semblance of a plan mapped out with what we have. The only thing I can’t predict is how this ends––we don’t know if there’s people with him staked out around the building, if he’ll have a knife to Yugyeom’s throat, if he won’t reveal where Yugyeom is until he gets his hands on you…” this last part makes him trail off and swallow nervously. He licks his lips and continues, “so there’s a lot that we’re going to just have to adapt to in the moment. That’s why I need you to be ready for anything, because we’re fighting against  _ everything.”  _

Jinyoung nods, face serious. It’s quiet for a moment; Jaebum is about to go upstairs into his room to change when Jinyoung says softly, 

“You’re going to kill him, aren’t you?” 

Jaebum turns from where he’d started to walk past him. Looking a bit over his shoulder, he can’t help but feel the stone get set in motion, that every moment from here is counting down the seconds until the very last time he will ever see one of their faces. Their eyes hold for the brief seconds of silence before Jaebum nods. 

“Yes. He’s going to die, Jinyoung. Because if he doesn't, then you will.”

“You were going to kill me once,” he whispers, and now his eyes are the same ones they had been when they were younger, large and deep and full of a shattered reflection of innocence. Jaebum remembers the way he had looked at him with wet eyes and touched him with frantic hands the night he asked Jaebum to kiss him and then disappeared into the nothingness. “Could you still?” 

“No,” he says immediately. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I thought I could, but I couldn’t. Not after I saw you again after so long, after I got to know who you had become.” he swallows. “They had me pinned from day one, did you know that? Jackson especially. He told me that I’m not who I thought I was. That the cold-blooded killer I had made myself out to be was a disguise. He told me, in not so many words, that the shell I had created only housed something fragile and afraid.”

He wants to reach out and touch his face; he can see from their short distance that Jinyoung’s eyes are starting to shine with unshed tears, but he has to start keeping his distance as much as possible. A clean break is better; the clean breaks always heal faster, even if the initial shock of it hurts more than the slow tearing away. He keeps his hands to himself and watches as Jinyoung pulls his bottom lip between his teeth and aches in the deepest pits of his existence to kiss it one last time before he goes. 

“Were they right?” 

Jaebum nods without hesitating. “Yes, they were right. I never could have done it, no matter how much I had convinced myself that I could.” 

The air in the room is sucked out in a rush like an inhaled breath and held. Tension pushes both hands against his chest until it makes him feel like his heart is going to burst from the pressure of it. He feels himself pulled in by the gravity of the universes in Jinyoung’s eyes, as he always had been, from the day they had met when Jinyoung moved in next door to the ruins that were both of their homes. 

His voice is quiet when he speaks.

“Why?”

And it hurts like a thousand arrows piercing his chest to admit it, but he does not think twice about the words before they leave him. He has spent so much of their time together telling lie after lie and in the dawning of the death he has chosen for himself in order to relieve all of them of the grief and the anguish that he has dealt them by his own hand, he no longer can. Every single lie had removed another vital second from his life, erased the tick mark in the wall that counted up his days. And now with the end breaking on the horizon, he can no longer tell them lies. For now there is only truth, and the one that he had buried the deepest is the most painful one to unearth from the dirt like a core-deep root; even as the words leave his mouth and he sees the look on Jinyoung’s face change, he can feel the pulling, and he can feel the blood that pools in the places the ripped up roots had left. 

“Because,” he says, and does not flinch away, “I love you. And I always have.” 

Even if Jinyoung had a reply, Jaebum does not want to hear it. Without another glance he turns on his heel and continues up the stairs to his room, looking out the window open on a cold day for the last time.

  
  
  
  


 

The day stretches on; every room in their house feeling like a flurry of activity at some point or another as blueprints are printed, showers are had and clothes are changed; gear is strapped in, strapped on, and the empty spaces of their home become tiny sanctuaries away from the madness that slowly winds up like a swing. 

Based on the information gathered from both Jinyoung’s experience in the warehouse when he had seen it and the most recent blueprint (from just a year ago; they all feel that at any moment their reservoir of good luck is going to empty), they have, for the most part, a clear idea of where to go and what to do. They also have satellite pictures and film stills to piece together an intricate, mostly-finished 3D model of the building. 

Jaebum has stood over it and pointed to every entry point, every possible staircase, every hole where someone could be hiding. Everyone, even Jae, though pale, leaned on their elbows and listened with intensity as Jaebum’s finger followed paths on the map they made and gave them their plan that they were to follow to the goddamn letter, in as many words. No one bothers to disagree. 

There’s no basement; for this Jaebum is grateful. A basement doesn’t necessarily make things more or less complicated in execution, but the relief is there nonetheless. Perhaps it’s the common sort of uneasy feeling given off by basements in general, but either way he is glad for the lack of one as he points to a certain spot on the map and draws their eyes to it. 

“This is an office sort of room,” he says, and makes eye contact with those who look up before looking back down at the map. “It’s quite big, but it’s settled against the back wall of the bottom floor of the warehouse. The rest of it seems empty: there’s a catwalk overhead that passes underneath the hole in the floor of the second level, but both it and the third level are just flat, no rooms. Does that sound right?”

Jinyoung glances at him and nods. They haven’t had another moment alone together since Jaebum had confessed his true feelings, the ones that lingered, and for that he is grateful. It seems, though, that the confession had made Jinyoung even harder to read. 

“Yes, we did table reads in that room sometimes. It’s more like a conference room than an office, because of its size. But I’m sure it’s empty. It was always empty when we were there—just slightly damp concrete and some exposed pipes.” Jinyoung shivers like he’s creeped out. “We’d set up folding tables in there, but always took them. Really it’s just an empty room.”

“Do you think Hyunwoo has Yugyeom in there?” Bambam asks, fiddling with the clip on his belt. 

Jaebum nods. “Yes. From the photos it looks like there’s no door, but it’s far enough away from the entrance of the warehouse that it still gives him time to hear us approaching and adjust for whatever surprises we bring. If had left Gyeom in the middle of the warehouse floor, it would be too much room that he’d have to accommodate for. It’s easier to keep control in a room with close quarters.”

Everyone’s heads bob like puppets on a string. No one else speaks as Jaebum lays out the rest of what they’ve planned based on everyone’s collective ideas:

With a finger he points to the outskirts of the dirt lot, beyond the fences that surround the area. “The five of you I want out here. He said to come alone but I doubt he’s going to have any backup—but even still we are only taking two cars. It’s imperative than you all stay out of the line of sight from the opening to the fence. No headlights, no phones, nothing. Not unless it’s absolutely necessary.

“Bambam, Mark, Jackson; you’ll be watching Jae like a hawk. Your main priority is to keep him safe.”

Jae pales visibly and pushes his round coke bottle glasses up his nose with a shaking hand. “I can’t stay here?” 

“Unfortunately, no,” Jaebum says and shakes his head. “It’s just not safe, Jae. But don’t worry, they’re going to take care of you. The closer to us you are the better we can ensure that.”

Everyone watches him—after a moment he just sets his shoulders and nods, accepting his fate like the rest of them. Though he’d had a different first impression, Jaebum thinks he isn’t so bad, and feels fleetingly glad that Jinyoung has a manager as good as him. He will need the support. 

“Youngjae, I’ll have the mic clipped on, but I’ll only turn it on if we need you guys to come in and it’s safe. In that case you’ll stay with Jae, but it’s unlikely it will be activated at all. You’ll be watching the security cameras outside and the one inside on the first floor.

“Jinyoung and I are going to enter through here,” he continues, heart starting to pick up in adrenaline. Jaebum taps the part on the map where a hole in fence has been opened up to make space for cars. “In the car. We’ll park it outside and then come in right through the front door because that’s what he’s expecting. From there…” he sighs and leans on both his hands. “From there it’s just adaption. We don’t know what he has in store or what kind of other demands he’s going to make, so this we’re going to play by ear. If for any reason something goes wrong, stay calm. Improvise. I know we don't ever plan for variables, boys, and this is riddled with them. But it’s our only chance.”

When no one says anything, six pairs of eyes on him in somber seriousness tinged with a swelling anxiety, he takes a deep breath and continues, 

“And no matter what happens, keep going. Nobody stops until he’s dead and the two of them are safe. Is that understood?”

He is met with a chorus of  _ yes _ . It would be a sweet sound in another time, when Jinyoung’s dark, hard eyes were missing from their round-table, the sound of their agreement. But it is more like an omen now, the voices of his life mixed with two others, one unfamiliar and one the resurrection of everything he thought he knew. And, as such, despite their understanding and the plan that has been laid out in front of them, the choir of their obedience fills him with an unbridled dread.

They can’t leave until nightfall. While the sun begins to set and the tension begins to rise with the moon behind the mountains, they finish putting themselves together: Youngjae with his gear, earpiece in and connected to his computer that he types rapidly into where he’s sitting at the bar in sleek clothes made for running. Mark, Jackson, and Bambam are dressed similarly: all in shades of black to blend in while weapons are stored in the invisible places on their bodies. There are two guns: one in the center console of their car, in case they need it and need to grab it fast, and one tucked into the back of Jaebum’s pants where it is then covered with a plain white shirt. 

“You look so…” Youngjae struggles for a word as they all stand around in the foyer, finally ready, but anxiously counting down the sunset. Finally he says, “casual. The dress pants, the white shirt. It feels weird to see you without your button up.”

Jaebum nods. “I know. But it would take too long to get to. This I can pull up faster and draw much quicker. Plus, it’s easier to fight in.” he nudges Youngjae’s shoulder with an elbow as an echo of the old times, but the shallow smile it gets out of him drops quickly. He understands. 

“I’m so scared, hyung,” he whispers. “I’m so scared. I’ve never been this scared before.”

“I know,” Jaebum says, and puts a hand on Youngjae’s arm. “I’m scared too. But we’re going to do this. Everything will be okay.”

Youngjae fakes another smile. “It really will, right?”

He fakes one, too. “Of course.”

Outside, the sun is finally too heavy to hold itself up in the sky, and it drops into the horizon to splash the world with dark blue. The stippling of stars is just barely visible  through the sliding glass door of the patio where he looks before inhaling and taking one last look around. 

Every face, so close to his heart. He has spent the years of his life memorizing every feature of them, every single one, until he could draw them from memory with his eyes closed and have them perfected down to the scars and moles they don’t even know that they possess. The faces he has watched grow from the chubbiness of youth to the stubborn handsomeness of manhood. The faces of the boys who had become his family, his friends; the boys who had become his brothers, his sons, an ever breathing conglomeration of the things that he did not have but craved so deeply as a broken child in an empty home. These boys he had grown to love, to protect, to  _ become.  _ Ever so intertwined are they into the very essence of Jaebum’s being that the thought of their absence burns hot like one billion suns in his heart that, once covered in ice, they had cracked open and made a home inside. To think that this is the last moment he has to study the faces he has memorized into the very lines of his DNA makes him ache unlike any pain he’s ever felt and he allows his eyes to water, just for now, just this once, and he hopes that they can forgive him for every transgression. 

“Hyung,” Jackson says, looking at him, visibly uneasy. “Are you—are you crying? What’s wrong?”

_ I am,  _ he thinks to himself, and again he holds their eyes one by one, the four of them, and allows the tears to well but not fall. He hopes the sorrow he wears like a badge for now will have some value to them when he goes and he hopes it’s enough. It has to be enough.

He blinks, and no tears fall. That’s just as well. He’ll have plenty of time to cry in the dirt. Infinite lifetimes of pain and punishment. 

“Nothing at all,” he lies, very evenly, and slips his arms into the shoulder harness that remains empty of a gun and they all begin to head down the stairs. “It’s time to go.”

  
  
  


 

The tension between them in the car as they drive is palpable, too thick to talk through. The other boys follow them in the car a couple hundred yards with the lights turned off; Jaebum is careful to take the side streets to avoid getting caught by the police. The noise of the city moving on without them outside the windows does nothing to dispel the anxious feeling of the ending approaching, but instead rushes it into a hurried sort of crescendo. Almost there, but not quite. The city streets get darker and darker as they leave the brightly lit parts of the city and enter into the industrial district and he wishes, more than anything, that he had something to say to Jinyoung: some words of comfort, some promise that everything is going to be alright, but they turn the last corner before the sprawling dirt lot where the warehouse stands lonely and haunted in the middle and has nothing. 

The chain link fence surrounding the perimeters of the lot is broken in a lot of places, the dark green of the construction fabric attempting to block the view ripped and tattered to flap in the wind that kicks up as the tires roll into the dirt from the smoothness of the road. He looks into the rearview and doesn’t see the front of the other car turn the corner until he’s edging the car through the hole in the gate, and for that he can breathe out a sigh of relief, though small. So far everything is going to plan: when they pull up on the side where the fence is still mostly intact, they should be able to avoid detection. He thinks that Hyunwoo will be too preoccupied by the two of them to realize that they’re here at all, anyway, but he’d rather be safe than sorry. 

“It looks awful,” Jinyoung says suddenly, and it makes Jaebum jump a little as he pulls the car forward. He’s leaning in his seat, gazing out the windshield and up at the ruined three-story building made from old brick and concrete like a war-torn monolith. “It didn’t look this bad when we filmed here. It’s been a few years, but for it to look like this?” he points out of the window to where the windows on the top two floors have been freed of their glass panes in star-shaped explosions of cracks. “They haven’t even boarded the windows on the top, but they have on the bottom. I wonder why.”

Jaebum stops the car and looks with him. The place is undoubtedly abandoned, and creepy in its own right because of it: the corners of what was once a square building have weathered and crumbled into rounds, holes punched into the brick everywhere along the flat front. Broken glass litters the dirt lot and the utter darkness of the place makes Jaebum feel like he’s in some sort of horror movie where the two leads go into a place that has KEEP OUT written in screaming letters all over it and never come back.

“Jinyoung…” he says, and then stops; Jinyoung drops his hand and looks over to blink at him in the dark. The paleness of the headlights where they illuminate and bounce off the wall only bathe him in an eerie light that does nothing to dispel the feeling slowly creeping up his throat. “I…”

He’s not even sure what he’d been about to say. He’s not sure that he has anything  _ to  _ say, just that he had felt the need to say something. In all of their other missions, no matter how confident he was in the outcome or not, he had never once felt the need to tell any of them goodbye. Never once had he ever had the sense that if he didn’t say something he would never get another chance to do so, and yet, now the feeling overwhelms him. Jaebum had nothing particular to say and still felt the need so say  _ something,  _ to leave Jinyoung with one last thing just in case their time ran out for good. 

“What? What’s wrong?” 

“Nothing,” he lies, and exhales heavily. He runs a hand through his hair and feels the empty holster brush against his ribs. “Just––what I said earlier, I shouldn’t––I shouldn’t have said that.”

Jinyoung interrupts him: “Did you not mean it?”

He pauses, but only for a moment. “No, I meant it.”

“Then yes, you should have.” he puts his hand on the door and takes a deep breath. “And we’ll talk about it later. Let’s go get our boy.”

_ Our boy.  _ Jinyoung opens the door and floods the cab with light that disappears just as quickly when he slams it shut.  _ Our boy,  _ as if Yugyeom is really theirs, as if they were once again the union that they had been in their youth, inseparable in the worst of ways. It makes him ache as he steps out behind him and stands shoulder to shoulder with Jinyoung in front of the building in silence. 

_ We’ll talk about it later,  _ he had said. Is he regretful that later will never come? He isn’t sure. Either way, there’s no time to dwell on it. He puts his hand on Jinyoung’s back lightly, for just a moment, to urge him forward toward the door hanging haphazardly off rusted hinges. When Jaebum grabs the side of it and grunts with the effort of yanking it up and sideways, flakes of coppery rust sprinkle down like snow and coats his shoulders. Jinyoung ducks under the part of the rotted wooden door frame hanging down a bit and disappears into the shadows of the inside of the warehouse.

When he steps in behind him, plunged into a ghostly dark illuminated only in circular spotlights throughout the first floor by dim, swinging lightbulbs as dirty as the floor, he wrinkles his nose in knee-jerk disgust. The smell of rain would be pleasant if it wasn’t mixed with the dirt and the industrial smells of metal and runoff; as it is, the pungent odor of stale water and rust makes it a little hard to breathe. 

The little lighting in the building makes it hard to see; he wonders just how much Youngjae is getting on the security camera and if he can even see that the two of them have entered already. Jinyoung goes to step forward and Jaebum reaches out to stop him, but his foot has already pressed down on a pile of broken glass and the  _ crunch  _ is nearly deafening in the silence. Jaebum holds his breath and fists his hand in the back of Jinyoung’s shirt as the two of them freeze, two statues in the dark. 

After a beat of silence, a tinny, wavering voice floats to them across the dim:

“H–hello? Who’s there?” 

At the sound of Yugyeom’s whimper, Jaebum doesn’t think he could have held onto Jinyoung even if he tried, which he doesn’t. Both of them immediately hit the ground running: their shoes crunch and slide across the broken glass of windows and bottles, kicking aside piles of bent, rotted wood and discarded building materials gone obsolete with the passing of time. The ground is too wet inside the building for dust to kick up from the thin layer of dirt that has accumulated on the floor like a carpet, but the muddiness sticks to the bottom of their shoes as they race through the broken warehouse toward the sound of Yugyeom’s voice.

Jaebum, at the last moment, grabs the neck of Jinyoung’s shirt and yanks him backward. He yelps and falls behind a little, having to grab the wall outside of the door to the dark conference room to not fall, and Jaebum steps in before him and blocks the doorway with his body so that Jinyoung can’t get through. He struggles against Jaebum’s back, pushing him, trying to shove through either side of him, but Jaebum uses the strength in both arms against the frame to keep him from passing. 

“Let me––Jaebum! He’s in there!  _ Move!” _

_ “Wait,”  _ Jaebum commands from between his teeth, a nervous sweat starting to pour down the sides of his face to drip down his neck. Jinyoung stops struggling against his back but keeps his hands fisted tightly in his shirt at his sides.

Jaebum is no stranger to tricks: they’ve used many in their years as hitmen, anything and everything to draw out their target if they proved to be more stubborn than the rest. Despite his doubts in a lot of Hyunwoo’s abilities, he had managed to do this so far and escape notice until now, and so Jaebum does not want to make any more assumptions that may get one, or all, of them killed. So he waits in the doorway with his eyes straining to make out anything in the pitch dark of the room for another sign that Yugyeom is really  _ here.  _

Something shifts in the dark, toward the center of the room. Jaebum’s heartbeat kicks up a notch. There’s a slight wheeze, and then:

“Who is that? Hyung? Jaebum hyung? Is that really you? I––I can hear you breathing, who is that––”

Yugyeom’s voice, so small, like it had been when he was a child roaming alone on the street with no home to go back to. Terror colors every corner of him bright red and he bursts forward into the room with Jinyoung mere inches behind.

“It’s me, Yugyeom,” he says quickly; it’s too dark for him to see anything except the movement of him, and as much as he wants to go to him immediately, some sense that prickles the back of his neck makes him stop in his tracks. Jinyoung seems to sense his hesitation and stops besides him, chest heaving. “It’s me, Gyeomie. It’s hyung.”

The dark is broken by a sharp sob, one that raises the hair on his arms. It’s so heavy, full to the brim of relief, and it hits Jaebum like a truck. He grinds his teeth against a gasp and holds Jinyoung back with his arm even as Yugyeom continues talking to them through the thick wall of his tears. 

“Oh thank god, hyung, I’ve been so scared, hyung, please untie me, please, please––”

“We’re going to get you out of here, Yugyeom. Just be patient, stay calm––”

“The rest of them are here too?” he wails, and Jaebum hears the chair scrape against the floor with an eerie sound as the bottoms of Yugyeom’s shoes slide uselessly in the dirt. “Where are they?” 

“It’s just me––the boys aren’t here, Yugyeom, they couldn’t come, but Jinyoung is here––”

Yugyeom gasps in the dark, somewhere in front of them; Jaebum’s heart explodes against his chest in anticipation. “Jinyoung hyung is here? You brought him? Oh, god, hyung, please, it hurts, hyung, I’m scared––”

“It’s going to be okay, Yugyeom––”

All of a sudden there’s a hum like the second just before a breaker bursts, and then the room explodes into light.

Jinyoung and Jaebum cry out in unison and shield their eyes against it, bright and overbearing after so much dark, and Yugyeom just whimpers. A familiar voice cracks through the air like a whip and lashes at them, 

“All this time and you’re still lying to them, huh,  _ Sejin?” _

Hyunwoo’s voice is miles away from what it had been the first day they met. It’s cold, and distant like a far away planet; the way he says Jaebum’s fake name like an insult drips with poison.

He blinks into the light as his eyes adjust. Now that the room is lit up to daytime brightness by a floodlight from somewhere in the corner, he can see where Yugyeom is tied to a chair in the center of it. Heavy industrial rope binds his arms behind his back and criss-crosses against his thin chest. His thighs are bound together to the knee, ankles free, but unable to do little more than fishtail back and forth as he pushes uselessly against the floor. The sight of a black blindfold tied too tightly over his eyes makes him angry, but all of the visible bruises, cuts, and blood on his face, his neck, and his chest sets his blood to boil.

Jinyoung twitches like he’s going to run forward, but Jaebum locks his elbow and keeps him back.

“You’d know a thing or two about lying, wouldn’t you, Hyunwoo-ssi?” he says back, his own voice cold. 

Hyunwoo steps out from the corner where he’d been standing in the shadow of the flood light. The juxtaposition of him here in this room is so strange, much in the way that Jinyoung standing in their living room had been: it feels wrong, as though someone had cut out a story-book hero and pasted them into the middle of a horror film. He’s so clean cut in his dark suit, similar to the one he’d been wearing the day he’d met Jaebum on the front lawn of Jinyoung’s house. Everything about his screams  _ wrong! Wrong! Wrong!  _ to him; Hyunwoo’s mouth just curls into a handsome smile and he puts his hands in his pockets as though they’re merely having a friendly conversation instead of beginning a standoff. 

“Oh, sure,” he drawls, and he’s close enough that he can put his foot flat against the back of the chair Yugyeom is strapped to and he kicks it once, hard. Yugyeom grimaces but doesn’t cry out and Jaebum feels his anger surge. “But we all know about lying, don’t we?”

This seems directed at Jinyoung, who tenses against Jaebum’s arm. “I’ve never lied to you.” 

“You haven’t?” Hyunwoo titls his head. “Are you sure? It seems like you’ve lied about a lot of things, Jinyoungie. Like how you had a whole little family just waiting for you to come back to them after you abandoned them and moved to the city to get famous. You never told any of us about that. You said you were adopted at eighteen and that you just moved from foster home to foster home growing up. That isn’t quite true, now, is it?” 

“I never lied about that,” he says through his teeth. “I just made a decision to omit my past. I did get adopted at eighteen when I moved to the city.”

“An omission of truth is just a fancy way of telling a lie, don’t you think?” 

Jinyoung doesn’t answer. 

Hyunwoo sighs. He shifts a little, coming around to the side of Yugyeom’s chair and looking down at him sitting in it. 

“You know, I hate that it had to come to this,” he says, too casually, and it makes the hair on Jaebum’s neck stand up. He had seemed so heartbreakingly  _ normal  _ when they first met. How could he have ever predicted that someone so calm in their cruelty was sitting just under the surface?

“Oh, I’m sure,” Jinyoung bites; Hyunwoo throws him a look that cracks his blasé exterior for just a moment. He puts a foot on Yugyeom’s thigh and pushes just enough to balance him on two legs and threatens to let him tip over. 

“Of course I do. I never wanted to hurt you, Jinyoungie,” he says, and both of them recoil a little. 

Jaebum feels Jinyoung struggle a little against the barrier of his arm. “You hired someone to kill me!” 

Hyunwoo sighs and lets Yugyeom’s chair slam back down to all four legs. His teeth click together audibly and a trickle of fresh blood drips its way down his chin where the top ones have sliced into his lip. 

“True. I did do that. I wasn’t planning on it, though, you know. From the moment we met,” he says, and glances up at the ceiling, likely picturing the hole in the ceiling where he’d saved Jinyoung from falling through, “I knew there was something about you. I knew we were destined to be together.” 

“That’s bullshit––”

“Be  _ quiet,”  _ he snaps, his first real sign of anger since they’ve arrived, and it’s a bit terrifying to see the red in his face as he kicks roughly at the leg of the chair in front of him that scrapes loudly across the floor with Yugyeom still in it. He takes a deep breath and continues,

“You were so warm that day, when I saved you from falling. I thought maybe I hadn’t saved you from the other sort of falling,” he says with a smirk, and Jinyoung starts to shake. “I quit working for Kim Hyungmin that same day to come work for you. And you were so happy––” he laughs, but it’s eeriely devoid of humor. “When we slept together that same night, I couldn’t believe it. I thought, how lucky am I? That Park Jinyoung fell in love with me so easily? And it was so good for a while––”

Seething, Jinyoung interrupts again. “I never said I loved you, Hyunwoo, and you knew that. You knew I didn’t want to be with you that way.”

Hyunwoo cocks his head like a confused dog. “But you always came back to me, didn’t you? It didn’t matter how many times you went home with someone else, you always came home to me. Even when we agreed it would be better if I was your head of security instead of your bodyguard, every time one fell through, you came back to me. They couldn’t satisfy you like I could, huh, Jinyoungie? They just weren’t good enough.” For the first time, Hyunwoo meets his eyes, and Jaebum is unsettled by the lifelessness in them until he looks back at Jinyoung. “How about him? Did he fuck you as good as I did?”

Both of them tense; Jaebum’s temper flares to dangerous burning, but he holds back in fear of any sudden, rash movements kick starting something they can’t handle. 

Jinyoung ignores the jab, though. “How many of them did you threaten into leaving?” 

“It’s not that I  _ threatened  _ them,” he drawls, pulling his hand from his pocket to look at his nails like he’s getting bored. That’s a bad sign and it makes Jaebum itch to reach for the gun tucked into the back of his pants. “I just made suggestions. They left on their own.” 

“Fuck you,” Jinyoung spits; Hyunwoo’s head snaps up and the look on his face is downright furious. “It was never going to happen for real between us, and you knew that. I told you over and over it wasn’t exclusive. I wasn’t in love with you. I was never going to be in love with you, fucking delusional––”

“Jinyoung,” Jaebum warns, voice low, but Jinyoung just keeps going. 

“I don’t care about you, I never cared about you. Not like that. You were good for sex and protection and that was it. I can’t believe you were crazy enough to think that I was in love with you––”

_ “Crazy?”  _ Hyunwoo spits, and now both of his hands are out of his pockets and balled to fists at his sides. This has started to go downhill fast and Jaebum scrambles to think of a way out that doesn’t put either Jinyoung or Yugyeom at risk. “I’m not crazy. I’m not fucking crazy––”

“I want to know how you did it,” Jinyoung interrupts, shouting at him. “I want to know! Tell me! How did you take out the hit without getting caught? Huh? Who did you hire to do it for you?” 

Hyunwoo’s eyes are wide, like he’s surprised, but then he laughs. Long, and loud, and still terrifyingly empty of anything like real humor. 

“Hire? You think I hired someone?”

“This company––”

“Oh, you mean Sun Corp?” Hyunwoo says casually, and again, Jaebum feels struck by surprise. “It’s an intelligence company. A very, very secret one that operates out of the United States. Not many people know about it; it’s not very legal, to say the least. They mostly supply the black market with weapons. Guns, bombs, military grade stuff. Equipment like bugs, cameras, you know, typical spy stuff. Certain sects deal in trafficking, but––” he shivers like it gives him the creeps. “I don’t like that. Those branches have mostly become independent. I won’t work with them.”

Jinyoung’s mouth is hanging open, dumbfounded. “Work  _ with _ them––?”

Hyunwoo barks a  _ ha!  _ “You sound surprised.” 

“You work for them––?”

“Work  _ for _ them?” he laughs again. “Jinyoung, I  _ own  _ them. Well,” he tosses his head a little, “sort of. My parents own them. Or, they did, until they died. The company is still under them so it can’t get traced back to me as quickly, but I guess, in a sense, I do own it.” he smiles. A shark’s smile, light glinting off his teeth. 

“Son Hyunwoo––” Jinyoung inhales sharply. “It’s just a play off that, isn’t it? Sun Corp. Son Hyunwoo. Because it sounds similar. You were––you’ve been involved in this from the start. It’s always just been you, hasn’t it? That’s how you had so much money. Because of this.”

He nods, grinning like he’s  _ proud.  _ Jaebum wants this to end, and he wants it to end now. Jinyoung twitches harder against his arm and Hyunwoo seems to notice that both of them are getting antsy. 

“It’s always been me, Jinyoung. In every way. The reason I want you dead is because if I can’t have you, then neither can they.”

And, in the span of a single second, there is a heavy, silver gun in his hand where it hadn’t been before. He doesn’t look as he aims it to the side of him, where Yugyeom has been sitting as still as a statue in his chair and just listening to the story unravel, unable to do anything but whimper in terror when Hyunwoo kicked his helpless body. Jaebum pushes Jinyoung backward enough that he can reach back and untuck the back of his shirt and draw his own gun; he levels it at Hyunwoo, hand steady.

He just laughs. “You think you could shoot me before I shoot him?” he motions at Yugyeom with the barrel of his gun and Yugyeom makes a noise in the back of his throat that sends Jaebum’s rage through his veins like a flash flood.

“Better yet,” he continues when Jaebum doesn’t answer. He clicks the hammer back and Jaebum does the same with his heart pounding in his ears. “Would you want to take that chance?

“What do you want, Hyunwoo?” Jinyoung says from just behind him. “Tell me what you want.” 

“I just want you,” he says, and for once his voice is colored with something other than empty emotion. “But I want you  _ dead.”  _

Jinyoung swallows audibly. Jaebum’s hand tremble, but only for a moment.

The feeling in his voice goes and the smile comes back to curl the corners of his heart-shaped mouth. He points at Jaebum with the gun before returning it to Yugyeom.

“And I want him to do it.” 

Silence. There is no other implication, he had made his wish loud and clear. He wants Jinyoung to die, right here, and he wants Jaebum to be the one to do it while he watches. There was never any other ending in Hyunwoo’s mind: this is what he has wanted from day one, for someone else to do the job, and the added Shakespearean drama behind the two of them being former friends (lovers?) only adds to the joy in which he will hand down Jinyoung’s execution.

He won’t do it. Of course he won’t. Jaebum had promised him, and the rest of them, that he was going to fix this however he could; he will be held to that promise until his last breath and he will make good on it. If there is one thing he must do before he leaves the earth it is that he will deliver on his promise to keep them both safe and to sacrifice himself in the name of it in the hopes that they will see he had done it for them and the betterment of their lives, and he hopes they understand, someday, that he will do it without an ounce of regret. 

“Jaebum,” Jinyoung says, sounding breathless. Hyunwoo just smile that shark’s smile. 

“Untie him first,” he says, and nods at Yugyeom. “Untie him first and let him go and I’ll do it.” 

“Hyung!” Yugyeom shouts, straining against his ropes. Whatever is in Jaebum’s voice must be believable, because even Jinyoung gasps. “Hyung, no! You can’t! Just kill me instead!” 

Hyunwoo raises an eyebrow. “You’ll really do it, won’t you?”

Jaebum swallows and prays to God and whatever else might be listening that he doesn’t give himself away. “Yes. I’ll do it. But only when you untie him and let him go.”

“Jaebum,” Jinyoung whimpers behind him, and he feels Jinyoung’s hand fist in the loose back of his shirt as Hyunwoo shrugs and starts to untie Yugyeom with one hand, the other holding the gun planted firmly against his neck. “Jaebum, no matter what, you have to go through with it.”

He turns his head slightly. “What do you mean?” 

“You have to––” he hiccups, and his voice, once dark with anger, is now colored with a similar fear. “You have to kill me. Don’t you? He’s going to let Yugyeom go. This is the exchange. My life for his.” 

_ No,  _ he wants to say; he wants to touch him and tell him that, no, it won’t be Jinyoung’s life for Yugyeom’s, but his own life for both of theirs. But he just looks Jinyoung in the eye through the strands of his long hair that have plastered to his forehead with sweat and nods. 

“If that’s what it takes, Jinyoung.”

He bites his bottom lip, face pale. Jaebum wonders if he thinks that he’s accepting that this is the end for him, and if he’s considering the life he had versus the life he had created for himself, and weighing the balance of the two. Whatever the answer is, neither of them have it; Jinyoung tries to school his face into a look of fierce determination but Jaebum can still see the fear underneath, and it hurts.

When he looks back, away from the anguish on Jinyoung’s face, Yugyeom has been freed of his ropes and falls to his hands and knees on the dirt floor to cough and gag on the blood that had run down the back of his throat. One hand comes up to yank off the blindfold and he looks up immediately where Jaebum and Jinyoung are standing together; by the look in his eyes Jaebum knows he wants to run to them, and he must make sure that Yugyeom gets out. He won’t allow him to watch how the rest of this plays out.

“Hyung––”

Jaebum’s heart thumps painfully agaisnt his chest. “Get out, Yugyeom.”

“But––”

_ “Go!”  _ he shouts, once, and immediately Yugyeom is up on his feet and disappearing from the room. He just hopes that Yugyeom has the sense to keep running through the gate and to where the other boys are waiting for him.

“Now that the brat is gone, let’s set the stage for the final act, shall we?” Hyunwoo drops the gun and violently kicks the empty chair away toward the wall, where it bounces off and cracks from the impact. He points to the empty space it made with the gun. “Jinyoung, I want you to kneel right here.” 

He hesitates, for just a moment; Hyunwoo raises the gun at them both and his face changes.

“I let your little friend go because I was feeling merciful,” he growls. “I heard your fight in the kitchen that night you blew your fucking cover,  _ Sejin.  _ I know you can do it. You better do it, or  _ both _ of you are going to die.” 

Jaebum holds his breath as Jinyoung lets go of his shirt and passes him; seeing him lit so brightly in his casual clothes in the middle of this dank, humid room makes his stomach fall to his knees. He lets his own gun drop to his side as he watches Jinyoung do as Hyunwoo had asked, hardly looking at either of them as he turns to his side in between them and goes quickly to his knees with his face tilted toward the floor. 

“Don’t look so sad, Jinyoungie,” Hyunwoo says, and Jaebum’s body tenses when he uses the muzzle of the gun to lift Jinyoung’s chin. In the light he can see that his cheeks have dampened with the tears that have finally started to fall. His heart constricts tightly and his knuckles turn white on the gun. “Soon it’ll be over.” 

“It’ll be over for you too, Hyunwoo,” he says, and his voice shakes just a little. “Do you think you’re going to make it out of here alive? He’s going to––”

Jaebum jerks forward when Hyunwoo winds back and cracks the butt of the gun across Jinyoung’s face; the noise it makes when it connects with the corner of his jaw echoes against the tin of the walls and makes Jaebum grind his teeth. Blood immediately starts to pour down Jinyoung’s neck from the cut it opened up in the skin. 

When he doesn’t cry out, Hyunwoo smiles. “Good. Be quiet. It’s not about whether or not I make it out of here, alive, Jinyoungie. It’s just that  _ you  _ don’t.” 

Hyunwoo steps away when he doesn’t say anything, breathing hard and staring straight ahead with his hands balled to fists on his thighs. He motions for Jaebum to step up and take his place.

He does. His heart beats a stuttering, painful rhythm as his sneakers make imprints in the damp dirt of the floor, stepping up to Jinyoung like this is some sick game at the carnival, only there’s no colored lights, no other games, no prizes. Only death. He can feel Hyunwoo watching them as Jaebum stops in front of him just far enough to hear the way his breath leaves his chest in anxious pants. Jinyoung looks up at him and he is reminded of their moment in his bedroom not so long ago: their eyes meet through the film of Jinyoung’s tears, only the look on his face this time is determination, not defeat. Their breathing syncs and Jaebum thinks of every other time that they have looked at each other like this in quick succession like a slideshow on fast forward; every extended eye contact they ever held flashes before him and with a rough swallow as he raises the gun, he hopes that the feeling it gives him is something that he will remember even when he’s gone.  

He raises the gun. The barrel of it is aimed at Jinyoung’s forehead, just between the eyes, although he stands far enough away that it doesn’t touch his skin directly. Despite once thinking that he would be able to kill him, the idea of it makes him sick in a way he can’t describe with words, and he won’t touch the barrel to his head if he can help it. But he holds it there, nonetheless, their eye contact still held as the both of them realize that this is a glance at a future they had both diverted just by virtue of the feelings they had buried. 

Now Jaebum’s hand shakes, and he let it shakes openly as he keeps it aimed at Jinyoung’s forehead. He wants to close his eyes, but he can’t let Hyunwoo out of his sight like that. He’s standing to the left of them, arms crossed, and he can tell by the way that Hyunwoo sighs when Jaebum continues to let his hand shake and nothing else that he’s getting impatient. 

And he does: when Jaebum still doesn’t pull the hammer back on the gun, Hyunwoo makes an aggravated noise in the back of his throat and comes up behind him.

He pushes himself against Jaebum’s back, covering his hand on the gun with his own. He wonders if Hyunwoo can feel the pounding of his heart through his chest. With a sigh, Hyunwoo guides Jaebum’s finger to the hammer and cocks it back forcefully.

“Do you not know how to shoot a gun?” he says, and Jaebum tenses, coiled tighter than a spring. Jinyoung has resorted to looking at their knees and he wonders if this is because he’s thinking the same thing as Jaebum and is afraid to give away his next move, or if he has really convinced himself that he’s going to die by a bullet from Jaebum’s hand and just can’t bear to look.

He swallows. Hyunwoo is taller than he is, and a bit heavier, but that doesn’t mean Jaebum can’t overpower him. In fact, Jaebum has fought lots of men twice, three times his size and though he sometimes came out with more injuries than he started with, never once had he lost. He doesn’t intend to lose now. Not when Hyunwoo had stepped into such a crucial position for a plan that Jaebum had created as a hope but did not expect. Now that Hyunwoo is on him, if he’s careful, he can wrestle Hyunwoo’s gun far enough away from him to end this. 

Finger pushed toward the trigger, Hyunwoo takes a breath that Jaebum hears almost against his ear. “Say your goodbyes, Jinyoung. This is it––”

And just like that, Jaebum strikes.

Jaebum drops the gun and, not expecting him to let go, it slips from Hyunwoo’s fingers. Jaebum manages to kick it away with a shout as he turns and grabs Hyunwoo’s outstretched wrist, yanking it down and twisting the arm it’s attached to until Hyunwoo shouts in pain and starts to push back against him. The long strands of Jaebum’s hair drip sweat into his eyes as he maneuvers around his grip on Hyunwoo’s arm and dives for the gun that swings in his grip; Hyunwoo, too preoccupied by the sudden pain of Jaebum nearly breaking his arm, can’t pull away fast enough to prevent Jaebum grabbing it and firing off a random shot that catches him in the lower stomach.

He goes down, and quickly. Jaebum goes with him: Jinyoung is up on his feet and shouting at him, but Jaebum is so consumed by getting both hands around Hyunwoo’s neck to finish him that he doesn’t hear Jinyoung shouting at him to get the gun further out of his reach until Hyunwoo’s hand comes up with it clutched in his fingers now slippery with blood and smashes it into his temple. 

His head jerks to the side as color like the surface of black oil bursts across his vision. Hot blood gushes down the side of his face to his neck, into the collar of his shirt, and he almost loses his grip on Hyunwoo completely when he raises the gun again. It’s slower this time, though; the blood is rushing from the hole in his abdomen quickly as he lies on the ground and fights against Jaebum, the strength in his arms lessening when Jaebum digs his nails into his wrist hard enough to draw blood and he drops it with a gurgling cry. 

Through his teeth, Jaebum shouts for Jinyoung to grab the gun when he leans down to shove it away hard; it goes skidding through the dirt but he doesn’t see where it lands. He immediately blocks the hand that Hyunwoo swings at his face as he fights him on his back. Jaebum throws a leg over his stomach to straddle him and get a better angle to wrap his hands around his neck while Hyunwoo pushes at his jaw and face with one hand. Hot blood stains the black of his pants and soaks through to his skin as he wrestles with him, squeezing his knees against his ribs knowing that it hurts. Hyunwoo grunts and hooks his fingers hard into Jaebum’s mouth but Jaebum tosses his head back and keeps squeezing his throat.

_ It’s almost over,  _ he thinks, breathing hard, fingertips white as he crushes the fragile windpipe in Hyunwoo’s neck. Blood and sweat drench him and stick his clothes to his skin. Hyunwoo tries to breathe, and can’t; Jaebum thinks it’s over and is about to let go when Jinyoung screams,

_ “Hyung! Hyung, no!”  _

He hadn’t been paying attention. When Hyunwoo was no longer pushing at his face or clawing at Jaebum’s wrists, he had thought he was finally losing the strength, and that this would end with Hyunwoo bloodied and broken on the floor of a dusty warehouse. What he hadn’t expected was the last, desperate wind of a dying man. 

Jaebum never sees the knife. It had been hidden somewhere on Hyunwoo, but he isn’t sure where; Hyunwoo manages to get one hand under Jaebum’s arms outstretched to his neck and, with the utter last bit of the strength in him, drives it hard into Jaebum’s stomach just beneath his ribs. 

The world slows, tilting on her axis just enough to make him feel as though he had sidestepped. Hyunwoo’s hands fall away. The noise that he makes as he passes is lost beneath the sound of Jinyoung’s screams; those, too, muffled beyond the thundering of Jaebum’s heart in his ears.

He looks down at where his hands have come up automatically to grab the hilt of the long knife that twitches against his belly when he sucks in a labored breath. A fire begins to spread from the blade, engulfing him in the flames from the inside out.  _ Jinyoung,  _ he wants to say, but can’t; he opens his mouth but no sound comes out. His stomach contracts just slightly and the knife wobbles, sending rivulets of dark, burning blood leaking from around the shimmering silver of the blade now stained a violent red. He braces one hand on his thigh and uses the other to wrap shaking fingers around the handle and pulls in one smooth motion. The fire inside his body  _ roars.  _

_ “Hyung! No!”  _ Jinyoung screams again, but from somewhere else. As he lets the knife clatter to the concrete beside him and watches as blood starts to pump from the wound in time with his heartbeat, he wonders dreamily if Jinyoung had run outside to get them. There’s a microphone on his shirt, isn’t there? His right hand covers the opening in his stomach while his left hand searches slowly on his shoulders and chest for the mic he had clipped to his collar, but suddenly every atom in the air feels as though it has expanded to a thickness that makes him move as though he’s made of molasses. 

Jaebum sits up on his knees, still watching the blood pour from his stomach and over his hand now, gloving it in the shining wetness. When he opens his mouth to ask Jinyoung where he had put the microphone connected to Youngjae’s headset, nothing comes out but blood, and he coughs more of it onto the front of his shirt as he collapses backward against the wall. 

Suddenly he can see the rest of the room, head no longer tilted down but propped against the tin covering the concrete. He blinks slowly and watches as Jinyoung is pushing Yugyeom out of the room; he can hear them, sort of faintly, Yugyeom screaming his name underneath the tide that sloshes loudly in his ears. Waves that crash against an imaginary shore as Jinyoung finally gets him to leave and turns to drop to his knees between Jaebum’s legs where he’d fallen against the wall. 

“Hyung,” Jinyoung cries, and in the moment he realizes that Jinyoung has finally called him hyung, the pain blooms.

He gasps, eyes squeezing closed and then springing open; the world that had once been shrouded in a sticky quiet now rages into sound. Jinyoung is crying openly, both of his hands pressing against the wound in Jaebum’s stomach so hard he can feel the razor-blade pains of it all the way down to his toes. He wants to tell him to stop pushing it on it like that, that it  _ hurts,  _ but he opens his mouth to speak and just drools more blood down his chin that stains the collar of his white shirt. 

It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. God, it hurts. His body feels like it’s on fire, blazing, thrown onto an open flame with his stomach torn open and left in the sun. His fingers curl into the material of his shirt and dirt collects under his nails where his other hand had dropped to the floor. It hurts so bad he can’t breathe––he tries, gasping again, drowning, the one breath he manages to inhale a blistering wheeze. 

“Jinyoung,” he manages, it too little more than a wheeze; Jinyoung’s voice breaks on a sob, crying so hard that it’s a wonder he can see through those tears at all. “Jinyoung––”

“Don’t talk, hyung,” he cries, still pushing against the smile sliced into Jaebum’s belly, a red flower blooming over and over against the crisp white of his shirt. “Yugyeom went to get the other boys. It’s going to be okay, hyung, oh, my god, Jesus, hyung––”

But he knows. He knows that it won’t be. Hadn’t he done this same sort of thing to countless people over the years? Jaebum had made blood his career. Not all of the deaths came delivered by a knife, but plenty had been, and he knows. The blood continues to run out of his stomach like a faucet, sluggish but consistent. Had he not made this type of wound in other bodies before? He knows how this ends, and it’s with all his blood on the floor with his body gone still in the middle of it. 

This is the end he had wanted.

Weakly, he grabs Jinyoung’s wrist with his hand; it’s so slick with his own blood that he can’t quite grasp it and he slips a few times before he can curl his fingers enough to hold on. He tries to take another deep breath but it stops short in his throat and he wheezes more blood from his mouth as the pain grows brighter into conflagration. 

“Jinyoung,” he says, because it’s the only thing he  _ can  _ say. Now that he’s at the end, everything that he had ever planned in his head has left him, replaced only by the sound of his name. They’d been here once, a long time ago; Jaebum covered in blood and Jinyoung covered in his blood, and the only thing he’d wanted to say then was Jinyoung’s name as though it could bring him deliverance. He had not been able to say it then, but with the last of the breath in his chest he says it now, hoping that it’s enough to convey everything that he’s ever felt in just two syllables.

“Hyung, no, no, no, no,” he sobs, shaking so hard that the ends of his hair brush against his forehead and drop the sweat that has gathered down to his wrists. He leans his weight on Jaebum’s stomach and the temporary burst of pain makes him gasp louder, a deeper wheeze, the burning intensifying so much for a moment that he thinks it’s enough to keep him alive. But it just hurts more, then, and blood continues to run between Jinyoung’s fingers.

All the mistakes that he’s made. All the lies that he’s told. Every awful moment alone in the years that Jinyoung had gone, every feeling he buried. These are all the things that he wishes he could say to him now, at the end. He told himself that he would die with no regret but he thinks that maybe he should have written Jinyoung a letter and hadn’t, and now he would die against the wall of an abandoned warehouse covered in blood because he had been unprepared. So much time wasted.  _ So much time wasted. _ The boys had been right all along and he had kept them from Jinyoung for so long because of a selfish desire to be right, and now he will pay for it, by leaving them all in a world where his love for them all had been an uncertainty and not a fact.  _ This _ is his regret. Not telling them in no uncertain terms that he loves them, although he wears the badges of his love for them on his body in the form of the scars he had earned by stepping in to protect them. And if even Thomas does not believe him at the gates of Heaven, he will point out the permanent reminders of his love, one by one.

“I’m––” Jaebum gasps again as his body spasms with the pain. His grip on Jinyoung’s wrist tightens to the point where the bones in it grind beneath his fingers and he thinks,  _ this is it.  _ “Jinyoung–I’m––I’m sorry––”

“No,” he whimpers, and a cold draft rushes in from behind to cover Jaebum’s body in ice where it had once burning from the inside out. Sleepiness makes his eyelids heavy, and he starts to close them even as Jinyoung pushes harder on the aching hole in his stomach. “No, no, no, no, nononononononono hyung no open your eyes hyung look at me––”

“It hurts,” he says, softly, and then his eyes close. The image of Jinyoung’s face is burned against his eyelids as he starts to fall asleep. His body is shaken by frantic hands, but it feels so far away; he can hear yelling, and footsteps, but it’s miles away, and his eyes stay closed. More blood pours from his parted lips when he says, for the last time, “can’t keep them––

  
  
  


“––open! Hyung, please, no, no, no, god, keep your eyes open!” 

Jinyoung’s voice scrapes raw against his throat with a scream as he slams both hands hard against Jaebum’s limp shoulders.  _ “Hyung! Look at me!”  _

But he doesn’t listen. Jaebum had never been the type to listen. A sudden anger surges up hard through his chest and he grabs the front of Jaebum’s shirt stained to redness with blood. He lifts him up and slams him back, hard; he watches in despair as Jaebum’s eyes stay closed and his head just rolls on his neck. 

“Wake up!” he screams, desperate now. Every feeling on the spectrum claws its way through his chest while he beats at Jaebum’s body; blood covers every surface of Jinyoung’s arms, his own shirt; it had somehow gotten into his mouth and he can taste the copper of it on his tongue that mixes with the salt of his tears when Jaebum doesn’t answer him. Thoughts bounce off one another in a dizzying delirium that holds him down by the throat and makes it hard to breathe. 

When he’s about to lift Jaebum up again, he feels a pair of hands in the back of his shirt. Jinyoung fights against Mark’s hands when he pulls, trying to get him away from Jaebum’s body, but it’s no use––Jinyoung’s hands have turned to talons in the bloodied material of Jaebum’s t-shirt and through the tears he can tell when it rips underneath his nails as his body is jerked backward. 

_ “No!”  _ he screams, knuckles white, the hands in his shirt now moved to his arms and Jinyoung thrashes in Mark’s grip. Tears blur his vision and he closes his eyes against the scene in front of him.  _ “No! I won’t leave him! Jaebum, hyung, wake up!”  _

Both of Mark’s arms hook under one of his, and before he has time to twist away, both of Jackson’s are underneath the other and together the both of them yank Jinyoung away from Jaebum’s body. He screams so loudly he thinks that he could have burst something in his throat, scraped raw, mouth full of blood that isn’t his own. Familiar voices shout around him as he continues to kick and try to fight them off, every instinct in his body telling him to get back to Jaebum, to wake him up, to tell him that if he opens his eyes Jinyoung will forgive every sin he ever committed but  _ God, hyung, you have to wake up–– _

Mark and Jackson let him go long enough for Youngjae and Bambam to take their place. When they will not let him go, either, and he watches through the film of salt in his eyes as Mark and Jackson lift Jaebum from beneath the arms and legs, he resigns himself to it. He allows himself to drop backward into their arms and be lifted to his feet. 

They practically drag him through the warehouse but Jinyoung doesn’t care. He wouldn’t care if they just dropped him down and left him here to rot. He deserves it, doesn’t he? For letting Jaebum die thinking that Jinyoung hates him? He chokes on a sob. It had been Jaebum’s plan all along and Jinyoung was so afraid of what he was feeling that he didn’t look closely enough, that he refused to give Jaebum any leeway; he had not searched the deeper meaning of Jaebum’s words to know that he had always meant to sacrifice himself for the both of them and now that it has happened, Jinyoung feels like he could die, too. 

They had so much left to do. Jinyoung had told him that he never wanted to see him again but that was never quite the truth. He had felt burned by Jaebum’s lies, of course, and felt betrayed in the deepest sense of the word that Sejin had never been a person, just Jaebum’s disguise, but he knew in his heart that he could never love Sejin, anyway, and that Jinyoung wanted him because he was the ghost of Jaebum and craved that so deeply to fill the hole in his heart that his absence had made. And in his pain he had told Jaebum that he never wanted to see him again and that he had lost him but in the heart of his hearts he knew that, like the magnets that they are, they would never be far apart for long; no matter how much he tried to tell Jaebum that this would be over and they would part ways again, he knew that the void in his heart had a specific shape like two moles over one eye and it would never be full again without him. They would have fixed it, because Jinyoung would have wanted it, and every time Jaebum held his eyes and told him that he would fix it, Jinyoung was powerless to do anything but believe it. 

And yet, now, even in his death, Jaebum had lied.  _ I will fix this.  _

The boys let go of his arms and take off running toward the car; even though they scream at Jinyoung to stay right there and they’ll bring it to him, he doesn’t hear them. A sob hooks in his throat and breaks out of his mouth like the glass of the windows behind him. He drops first to his knees, soaked with Jaebum’s blood, and then to his hands to hang his guilty head between his shoulders that shake with tears. 

_ I love you,  _ Jaebum had said to him. Jinyoung cries into the dirt. 

_ I love you.  _

_ I love you.  _

_ I love you.  _

A chorus of both their voices, mixed together, a song he’ll never sing again.

_ And I always have.  _

  
  



	15. 13 | Act II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> at the gates  
> does thomas ask to see my hands 
> 
>  
> 
> [**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOu5LFNaVOM)  
> 

 

_“Jinyoung!”_

_The younger boy turned his head, his face pinched and angry. Jaebum would laugh if he couldn’t tell that Jinyoung was so scared beneath the puffed up anger._

_Jinyoung was standing in front of a beaten down corner store; the fact that it was open at all was a miracle, seeing at the neighborhood kids robbed it at least once a week. Most of their profit had to be going toward fixing the broken windows and replacing the things that got stolen like clockwork. At least one of the windows was boarded up at any given time, looking like a permanent stain._

_He stood fierce in front of the little shop; although the sign on the door said CLOSED, this has never stopped them before. Blood ran from Jinyoung’s nose and he sniffled but did not wipe it away. There was a bottle in one of Jinyoung’s hands, and money in the other._

_Jaebum called to him. “What are you doing?”_

_“Nothing,” he called back, but that was a lie. Even as Jaebum approached from the other side of the street he could see that Jinyoung’s chest was heaving. He was scared. He didn’t get scared easily. And this, in turn, made Jaebum uneasy._

_When Jaebum hit the middle of the street, it became clear what he was afraid of: one of the older neighborhood kids, older than them both, was leaning against the window of the corner store in the shadow; he leaned up and came forward to grin at Jinyoung who was a third of his size where he stood shaking on the sidewalk._

_“This your friend?” the older guy called, and Jaebum rolled his eyes. Jinyoung might be afraid, but he wasn’t. Jinyoung had gotten in plenty of fights before, too, but never with someone so much bigger than him. And in the last couple of months Jaebum could tell that he was different. He wasn’t sure what it was, and wasn’t sure that he would ever know. Just that something about Jinyoung had changed, fundamentally, and Jaebum couldn’t stop noticing._

_Jaebum shoved his hands in his pockets. “Yeah, that’s my friend. What’s it to you?”_

_The older boy nodded at Jinyoung, who turned away from Jaebum and stood his ground with the broken bottle clutched in his fist so hard his knuckles were white._

_“Your little friend has something that belongs to me.”_

_“Hmm.” Jaebum hummed and came closer, finally stepping up onto the buckling sidewalk, dirty shoelaces from his equally dirty sneakers dragging on the ground. “Is it the money in his hand?”_

_The older boy nodded. “Yup. Little rat thought he could get away with stealing it out of my pocket.”_

_Jaebum hummed again. He turned his head to look at Jinyoung, who had a bloody nose: Jaebum, in that moment, wasn’t sure if it was because he had tried to take on the boy himself or if he had arrived snorting blood back up as a black eye bloomed._

_“Is that true? Did you steal it from him?”_

_Jinyoung nodded._

_Jaebum shrugged. “Nothin’ I can do, man. Seems like it’s his money, now.”_

_He felt Jinyoung relax beside him. This was their routine as it had been since they met as children; when one was in trouble, the other came, and together they made it out. Sometimes by the skin of their teeth and not always without a fight, but together, they had seemed unstoppable. In Jaebum’s eyes this time was no different. Jinyoung loosened his grip on the broken glass bottle and let it twirl in his palm like the echo of a threat._

_“I’d suggest your little friend give that money back to me,” the older boy said through his teeth, but Jaebum just laughed. Jaebum’s own family couldn’t scare him with the threat of violence. This asshole really thought he could?_

_“Not yours anymore. Sorry, asshole. Seems like you should go find another corner to whore around on, huh?”_

_And it was then that something changed. A look passed over the older boy’s scarred face unlike that Jaebum had ever seen and wouldn’t ever see again. It was rage, it was hate, and it was murder. It was terrifying. Jaebum felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up just from the look alone and he felt afraid for the first time in his life that this might be the moment where he can’t fight his way out of a situation._

_Jinyoung, beside him, stepped forward and taunted him with the bottle and a snicker._

_The older boy swung. His fists were large and they were heavy; Jinyoung was fast, though, and he had the good sense to lean out of the way when it came arcing toward his face. He backpedaled and nearly fell into the road when both feet stepped off the sidewalk._

_But the older boy was not just out for this. He was out for blood, and he could see it in his face and by the way he reached into his pocket to pull out a knife that unfolded with a_ shink. _The noise echoed in the quiet of the street corner and from behind him, Jaebum heard Jinyoung gasp. Jaebum put up his hands and intended to fight until Jinyoung was long gone, out of sight, and no longer under threat._

_“Go home, Jinyoung,” he said, and swallowed hard. The older boy grinned and his teeth drooled red. He felt like an underdog hero from the comics they would steal from the grocery store and read in the park, or like some Bible character. Daniel in the lion’s den._

_“Hyung…” Jinyoung, from behind him. His voice was uncertain. It was likely that he, too, could smell the blood in the air now._

_“Go. Home.”_

_The older boy swung. Jaebum ducked. Jinyoung shouted at him. Jaebum again shouted at_ him _to go home, landed a punch on the older boy’s shoulder, but it did nothing to deter him. Jaebum grunted and swung again but did not see that the older boy had expected it._

_From behind him, Jinyoung had shrilly screamed,_

_“Are you fucking crazy? Hyung!”_

_The knife blade found his shoulder and sank in deep, to the hilt. It burned like a fire had started in his heart. Jinyoung had yelled something else but the ringing in his ears was too loud; he couldn’t hear anything else except the older boy’s laugh as he pulled the blade out fast and turned to run when the wound started to gush blood onto his shirt._

_He staggered backward, off the sidewalk and into the street. How strange, he had thought, that a flower could bloom on his shirt just over his heart. A red poppy, even, a perfect contrast to the white of the cotton. He blinked at the blood that poured over his hands when he lifted them, and did not flinch as his knees buckled and he fell to them in the road. All he could hear was the frantic beating of his heart inside his ears like an echo chamber, and against that, the echo of Jinyoung’s voice calling out to him._

_“Hyung, hyung, oh, my god, hyung, what did you do? What did you do?”_

  
_What he had to. Jinyoung knew that. He had seen that Jinyoung was in danger and he stepped in to stop it. When he was younger he had laughed at the idea that he would ever find someone to die for and yet, here he is, collapsing backward into Jinyoung’s arms, blissful that the last thing he’ll ever hear is the sound of his voice._

 _He wanted to say his name, to call out to him one last time._ Jinyoung, _he tried to say, but nothing came. The commotion of the sirens that approached quickly sounded a thousand miles away as Jinyoung cried over him and shook him to keep him awake, but he had let his eyes close, anyway._

  
  
  


_In his dreams, a faceless angel who stood at the gates asked him,_

Was he worth dying for?

Yes, _he told the angel. He pointed to the scar above his heart where the knife went in._

Yes.

 

 


	16. 13 | Act III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Death, but not for you, gunslinger. 

 

After days of wandering in an unnavigable darkness, Im Jaebum finally opens his eyes.

The first thing he does is try to take a deep breath: it burns, from the pit of his stomach to the top of his chest. His fingers curl to talons in stiff, unfamiliar sheets. He tries again, and gags; from somewhere over his head, there is a frantic beeping that starts that is timed perfectly with the thumping of his heart, strong, against his ribs. He keeps his eyes squeezed shut against the pain that flares up in the length of his body as he claws at his throat until a door swings open and someone is coming forward to slide a tube out of his mouth.

Jaebum starts to cough; it hurts, every single tiny movement sending hot stabs of pain in his abdomen, but at least he can breathe. When he finally blinks his eyes open with some difficulty, a doctor in a white coat is standing over him with a tiny flashlight shining in both of his eyes. 

“Good evening,” he says, and Jaebum squints away from the light, too bright for his sore eyes. The doctor clicks the light off with his thumb and puts the flashlight back in his pocket, exchanging it for a clipboard handed to him from behind by a nurse.

“Mr. Yoo, you are very lucky that your friends found you when they did,” he says, writing things down and looking at him every so often. “You lost a lot of blood. You were nearly dead when they got you here.”

_ Yoo––? My name is–– _

Memories come rushing back; the boys, their house, their jobs, Jinyoung, Jinyoung, Jinyoung. Though he still feels a little hazy on the later details, he remember quite vividly the day he saw Park Jinyoung again for the first time in thirteen years. 

Jaebum just blinks at the doctor and waits for him to continue. 

“You’ve been asleep for about three days,” he says, and puts the pen down. You almost died in surgery, too. Whoever stabbed you managed to miss all the important parts, somehow, but you nearly died of blood loss twice.” the doctor pauses. “How do you feel?”

Jaebum licks his lips; they’re so dry they’re cracked and bleeding, and the burst of copper on his tongue makes him feel like he’s going to be sick.

“Hurts,” he croaks, his voice hoarse from disuse. 

Incredibly, the doctor kind of chuckles. He puts a gentle hand on Jaebum’s naked shoulder and pats it lightly enough that it doesn’t jostle him. “It will hurt for a while, Mr. Yoo, but the team worked tirelessly to patch you back up, and we think you’re going to be fine.” 

Jaebum nods. Everything is so hazy, like he’s remembering things through a mosquito net. What happened? Where are the boys? Did they––his heartbeat starts to pick up, and the doctor frowns. Did all the boys get out of that warehouse alive? 

“Mr. Yoo? What’s wrong? Your heart rate is rising––”

“Did anyone I know stop by?” he asks, and his own voice scraping out of his dry throat hurts, but none of them are in the room with him when he glances around and panic drenches him in ice water. “Did anyone come to see me?”

To calm him, the doctor puts a hand on his arm. “Yes. One of the friends that brought you in is here in the waiting room. He’s been here every single day since you got out of surgery waiting for you to wake up. Would you like me to send him in?”

Jaebum’s heart calms, just a little. It’s most likely Youngjae, and he desperately wants him in the room to fill in the parts of his last few days that he’s missing.

“Yes, please.”

With a nod and another gentle pat, the doctor and the nurse both leave him alone in the room, letting the pneumatic door shut quietly behind them as they go toward the waiting room. Alone, he looks around: the hospital room is small, and quiet; the window has the heavy, white curtains drawn, but even still he can tell it’s nighttime by the way the tiniest sliver of orange lamplight sneaks in through the gap. White walls are sparsely decorated with art he doesn’t recognize and doesn’t look too closely at. With a grimace Jaebum pushes himself a bit onto his elbows and turns his head toward the bedside table where there is a large bouquet of bright colors and a stuffed animal cat laying on its side.

Reaching out with a quiet grunt, Jaebum’s hand taped with wires and tubes manages to flip the little card on the flowers over to read the message handwritten in familiar slant:

_ Sorry to hear you got stabbed, Bummie. We’ll be there as soon as we can.   
_ _ -Jonghyun  _

Jaebum snorts and drops to his back again; he winces when it sends that same painful ache racing up and down his body, and he settles into a more comfortable position to rub his eyes. He’s been asleep for, what did the doctor say? Three days? And yet, he still feels like he could sleep more. He wonders if that’s from the pain or just the exhaustion from getting through something he had no intention of surviving. 

A few moments later, the handle on the door turns and is pushed open. He opens his mouth to call out to Youngjae when he steps into the room, but his breath catches in his chest when the door closes them up in the dim silence and Jinyoung leans against the door. 

It’s quiet for a moment. He can see where both the soft lamp on the other bedside table to his right and the lamplight from outside reflect in the dark, obsidian pits of his eyes as he leans against his hands on the door like he’s afraid to come over. There’s a large mark on his jaw no longer covered by a bandage, but it’s an awful, scabbed over cut with a purpling bruise that spreads down part of his neck.   
  
When he sees it, more of that night comes back to him. He remembers that, Jinyoung getting hit with Hyunwoo’s gun. He remembers Yugyeom running from the room. He remembers Jinyoung on his knees in front of him, Jaebum pointing the barrel of a gun between the eyes that watch him from across the room. He remembers the way his heart had felt like it was breaking when he was too tired to keep his eyes open. 

His hands fist in the sheets again, and the monitor over his head is a dirty traitor that gives away how fast his heart starts to race. All the air in the room had left when he arrived, and it pushes against Jaebum’s chest when Jinyoung stands at the door and does not come all the way in.

“Jinyoung,” he breathes, and sound rushes back into the room. 

And just like that, Jinyoung is falling to his knees by his bedside. There’s already tears streaming down his face and Jaebum wants to tell him to stop, but his eyes are wet, too, and he has had enough of being unfair.

Jinyoung keeps his head down for a moment, but then raises it to look at him. Up close the bruise is so much worse, and his dark eyes are bloodshot like he hasn’t been sleeping or eating and just crying for days and days. Maybe he had. The idea of it makes Jaebum’s heart hurt.

“I thought you were dead,” Jinyoung says, and his voice wavers dangerously on the very tip of a blade. “I––Jaebum, I thought you were  _ dead.”  _

Jaebum wants to interrupt, but doesn’t. It’s clear that Jinyoung has been bursting to tell this part of his story and if it will make him feel better then Jaebum would sit through it for the rest of his life. Already he’s surprised that Jinyoung is the one who has been waiting for him to wake up, and he will not do anything to disturb whatever gentle balance their future is hanging in.

He chokes and wipes his eyes on his sleeve. “When you started fighting Hyunwoo, I just froze. I didn’t know what to do, and it was happening so fast––a shot went off and there was blood everywhere, but you were both still standing, until you got Hyunwoo on the ground. I thought it was yours at first, but then I saw you trying to kill him.” Jinyoung’s voice breaks; Jaebum has so many other questions, like where the other boys are and if everyone else is okay, but it’s clear by the way that Jinyoung looks at where Jaebum has grabbed his hand on the bed and unfocuses his eyes that it’s time for Jaebum to get the story from Jinyoung as he had seen it. 

“When the other gun got kicked away, I grabbed it, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I could have shot him, I guess. But you were both moving so much. I couldn’t. I was scared. Then he started to drop his hands and I thought it was over, but he––there was a hunting knife stuck in his belt that I hadn’t seen until he reached for it. And by the time I noticed, he had already managed to stick it into your stomach and I just––” Jinyoung lets out a quiet sob and drops his head. He squeezes Jaebum’s fingers. “You were bleeding everywhere and then you said you were sorry and then you stopped moving. Your eyes closed. I thought you were dead. I thought you  _ were dead, you bastard.”  _

“I’m so sorry, Jinyoung,” he says, because he is, and he doesn’t know what else to say. There are so many things he has to apologize for. By the way that Jinyoung acted around him over and over the days before they saved Yugyeom, he could live another thousand years and never have enough time or enough words to earn forgiveness. And he understands that. Perhaps deserves it, even still. So, for now, all he can do is say he’s sorry and hope that it’s enough.

_ “Wait,”  _ Jinyoung says, forceful, but not unkindly. He takes a deep breath and looks him in the eye. “I have more to say.”

“Okay,” he says, and for the first time in his life, he does not try to argue. He just listens. 

“Your body––you went limp. Totally limp. I tried to wake you up and I couldn’t. They had to drag me off of you, in the end. Even though I told him to leave, Yugyeom had been standing outside of the room and heard me scream for you when you got stabbed. When he saw you fall back he tried to run in but I pushed him out and told him to get the other boys, that they were waiting outside, and he finally ran off. They all came in at once shouting and some of them were crying when they saw you there in a pool of your own blood but they had to drag me away from you. Mark and Jackson carried you out and put you in the car to take you to a hospital. We all thought you were dead, hyung. While the younger boys went to get the other car, I cried in the dirt because I thought you were dead.” 

Jaebum’s throat feels tight with tears. He squeezes Jinyoung’s hand and he doesn’t say sorry again, but he hopes Jinyoung knows that he means it. 

Jinyoung wipes his eyes with the heel of his palm and keeps going, standing up to pull the chair in the corner closer to the bed so he can sit in it and grabs Jaebum’s hand again to hold it close to his chest. Despite the layer of his skin and his thick sweater, Jaebum can still feel the way it pounds against his bruised knuckles.

“You started talking in the car,” he says, and sniffles. “Mark and Jackson thought you were already dead, but you were still breathing. Very shallowly, but breathing. And then you started talking. 

He swallows. “What did I say?” 

“Just nonsense, I guess. You only said, ‘go home, Jinyoung’, at first, and then you said ‘go home’ again. That was it. They weren’t sure what was happening but it meant you were alive and they nearly killed themselves trying to get you to a hospital.”

Jaebum struggles to take a deep breath and blinks away tears in the dim light of the yellow lamp on the bedside table. With his free hand he carefully avoids the scrapes on his face with the wires taped to his hand and wipes them away, dabbing the dampness on the blanket over his thigh. 

“I’m––” he’s about to say that he’s sorry again, but it doesn’t feel like enough. He wants it to be, but it isn’t. “I’m––”

But Jinyoung interrupts him. His voice shakes again, eyes wet but not crying. Jaebum looks into his eyes and wonders how he could have ever betrayed someone so beautiful. How he could have ever tricked himself into hating someone that he loved so much that it hurt. The pain of his leaving had broken Jaebum and turned him into someone that he didn’t recognize and tried to be for so long until it almost swept him from the earth.

“Just tell me why, Jaebum,” he whispers. In the request there is so many other questions, ones that he is too afraid to answer, and ones that he isn’t sure if he can. “Just tell me why. Why would you do that to me? Why would you do that to  _ them?”  _

Even though his voice is still hoarse, and even though it hurts in more ways than one, Jaebum licks his dry lips and says,

“Because I thought I deserved it. Part of me still thinks I deserve it.” he pauses to see if Jinyoung is going to interrupt, but he has rested his elbow on the rail of the hospital bed and put his chin in his hand to listen the way that Jaebum had listened to him. 

“I hated you for so long. Or, I thought I did. I convinced myself that I did. They couldn’t––for whatever reason. They couldn’t hate you. I think it was different for them in a way that I wasn’t able to understand because I felt––I felt differently about you. Like I told you, I loved you. Maybe I didn’t always understand that’s what it was growing up, but it was. I loved you that way and they didn’t. And the night you left…”

He trails off. He had already told Youngjae this once. He had relived it in dreams a million times in different forms. And now, after all of this time, the man himself is sitting at Jaebum’s bedside with a bruise and tears waiting to understand. 

“It hurt so bad, Jinyoung.” he sucks in a painful breath to have admitted that out loud for the first time. “It hurt. You asked me to kiss you, and you cried, and I was so scared. I thought maybe kissing you had scared you away. You turned away and you ran off in that stupid jacket and left me alone. The next day I looked all over town for you. Everywhere. Every place that you might have been, I checked, and you were gone. I finally went back to the truck to see if you were there and I found that letter you left. It confirmed what I feared the most: you were gone for good. You left.

“Trying to explain to them that I hadn’t seen you… it didn’t make sense. None of us understood. And then day after day, Jinyoung, we didn’t know where you were. We fell deeper into the lives that we had started until we got recruited by a hitman syndicate. And we just did it because we were good at it, and kept doing it until we were the best. The first time they ever saw you on TV, I thought they could kill me if meant they could get to you. I told them they were never allowed to contact you, or try to find you. I had convinced myself, and them, that you didn’t want us in your life anymore. That you never did. But even still, they watched everything you were in without fail.”

“Oh, hyung,” he whispers, and starts to cry again.

“They told me all the time that I was a liar. That I did miss you and wouldn’t admit it. Of course they were right but I would have never said that to them. It turned into an ugly thing, so hateful, that when the hit for you crossed our paths, I really thought that I could do it. I thought I could erase you from their memories the way you had erased us, and it would be better for them. I was stupid to think that. Blinded by whatever I thought it would bring me. And they hated me for it. I’m sure they still do. I just wanted to make their lives easier, I wanted to take the pain of you not knowing them away from them the way that I couldn’t take it away from myself. That was naive and misguided. 

“And then I got to know you, through Sejin, and it was so hard to keep it a secret sometimes. I realized very quickly that I’d never be able to kill you. That I made the biggest mistake of my life thinking that I could do that when I still love you just as much as I did when you were in our lives. By then, even though I wanted to fix it, and was trying––that day I had an errand to run, I went to the house and talked to them. I told them I needed their help getting out of the contract and that I wasn’t going to kill you. It all started to unravel after that. It just kept getting worse and worse and everything that happened was my fault. It was because of me.” 

He takes a deep breath and winces when his stomach burns. Jinyoung hands him a glass of water that had been sitting on the table behind the flowers and he drinks it greedily even though it makes his stomach hurt. Their fingers brush when Jinyoung takes the glass back and he wishes more than anything in that moment that he could grab him and pull him inside of himself so that they would never be apart again. The agony of it has always been too much. The almost permanence of it has wounded him more deeply than Hyunwoo’s knife ever could have.

When they settle again, Jaebum continues. “And I thought this was the only way. It seemed like all of you hated me so much, especially you, and I thought that laying down my life for you and for Yugyeom would absolve me of everything I did. I thought that it would take away the pain of me causing the harm that I did. I planned to die either way, because I thought that I deserved it and that it would make everyone’s lives easier. But dying in front of you has always been the scariest thing I could imagine. All I’ve ever done is hurt them, and all I did was hurt you. I’m––” Jaebum’s voice breaks. “I’m scared of what comes next because I survived.

Jinyoung, crying openly, doesn’t bother to wipe his eyes. He grips Jaebum’s hand in both of his and brings it up to his mouth to kiss his knuckles and then leaves it there as he speaks.

“When I said that they would follow you to the ends of the earth, Jaebum, I meant it. You hurt them, yes. You hurt me, yes. But they have hurt you too, haven’t they? And you forgave them, didn’t you? This is family. Sometimes we hurt, not on purpose, and we forgive. You have to understand that they will forgive you, even though you tried to die in front of them like some kind of martyr.” 

Jaebum’s throat is raw with unshed tears; he twists his wrist to gently glide his bruised knuckles across Jinyoung’s bottom lip. He remembers quite vividly the way he had looked at it that night and wished to kiss it one last time. 

“Do you forgive me?” he whispers, and finds he’s afraid of the answer. 

Jinyoung doesn’t respond for a moment. The machinery around him hums and beeps quietly as Jinyoung leans away a little and plays with Jaebum’s fingers with both hands; he traces his palm with his fingertips, following the lines, and splays his fingers to fit his own in the gaps that it makes. He runs his fingertips along the ridges of his knuckles like he’s trying to memorize them. Finally he closes his hands around Jaebum’s and sighs softly. 

He looks at him. “Yes, hyung, I forgive you.”

All the tears that he had wanted to hold back spill over. His voice breaks and the hot salt of them track down his cheeks, sting the open cuts on his skin, spill into the cracks of his lips and onto his tongue. Jinyoung allows him to cry and squeezes his fingers. 

“And it’s not just because you almost died,” he says softly. Jaebum keeps his eyes closed as he cries, pulling Jinyoung’s hands to his own bare chest, hooked up with wires, and keeps it over his heart while Jinyoung talks. 

“But I forgive you because you deserve it. You deserve the forgiveness, hyung. You deserve it because you are selfless. Don’t argue,” he admonishes gently, when Jaebum opens his eyes to look at him and opens his mouth to disagree, “we all have our moments of selfishness and you’re not an exception. But, hyung, you are selfless, and you value love above everything else. I can forgive you because you have never once hesitated to offer yourself up in exchange for the people you love to keep them safe. This last attempt was misguided, in its way, but it was not untrue.

“When I left…” he pauses, looking away from Jaebum’s face at their intertwined fingers over Jaebum’s heart. He seems like he, too, is finally ready to tell someone about the night he left. No one will understand the pain of it like Jaebum, and it is for this that he thinks the universe has decided to keep them together, connected by fate.

“When I left, it wasn’t just because of you. I know they accused you of that. But I left because––I left because I was scared.”

“Of what, Jinyoung?” he whispers. Jinyoung’s voice hitches, but his eyes remain dry for now.

“I was so afraid of watching you die. Of watching any of you die. I thought I knew everything there was to know about that kind of life. I was comfortable in it. I was rarely scared of anything. But that day––that day when you saved me from that older kid that I had robbed…  I saw you for what you were. A hero.”

“I’m not a hero.”

Jinyoung shakes his head in disagreement. “No, you are a hero. To me, and to them. You are the very essence of what makes a hero. You stepped in for me when you knew that I was not strong enough to win that fight, knowing full well when he pulled out that knife that you weren’t strong enough to win it either. But you fought it anyway. And then when he stabbed you in the chest, God, hyung,” Jinyoung’s voice shakes and he pulls a hand away to run it through his hair. “There was so much blood. You were dying in my arms. I was watching you die. I was only eighteen. We were supposed to graduate in a couple of months and yet there we were in the middle of the street, covered in your blood. 

“The ambulance got called because someone heard me scream. By the time they got there, your eyes were closed. They didn’t know if you’d make it, but they took you away from me and left me sitting in the middle of the street drenched in your blood and I cried so hard that I fell asleep there. I only woke up when Mark and Jackson heard what happened and came to find me on their bikes.

“After that, you got better. They said that the blade wasn’t very long, and that it went up into your shoulder instead of down into your heart, but that pulling the knife back out so fast widened the wound and you lost so much blood. That’s what almost killed you. And all I had done was sit there and watch as you bled out on me. You got better, but every night I dreamt of it. I dreamt that I was  _ drowning _ in your blood, hyung. That you were going to die and you were going to leave me behind. I started dreaming that the ocean was made of your blood, of their blood, and that I was left alone in it. And I couldn’t do it, Jaebum. I couldn’t sit around and watch all of you fall further into this life and go another day knowing that at any time one of you was going to die and I was going to have to see it.”

Jinyoung takes a deep breath. “So I left. I wanted to know, just once, what it was like for you to kiss me, something I had wanted since...I don’t know. Maybe since I was born. I don’t  _ know _ . But I was dying every night to have you kiss me and so I wanted it before I left you. That’s selfish, I know. But it got me through the nights I slept on the streets in Seoul before I found the people who would adopt me. The nights I slept on bus stop benches, I remembered what it was like for you to kiss me, and it kept me warm, hyung. It wasn’t right. I know. And I know that there’s––there’s so much we have to fix. But getting you all back in my life and then almost losing it right away…” he finally looks back into Jaebum’s eyes. The brown in them is as deep as it has ever been, and open, a universe for Jaebum to fall into.

“I can’t lose it again. I know that I told you that you lost me and that you couldn’t fix this, and if you don’t want to, then I understand. But I only said that because I was afraid. I’ve always known in my heart that I would find my way back to you some way or another. You used to laugh at fate, didn’t you? But I believed in it. When we’d lay together and look at the stars and you tried to show me the constellations I couldn’t see no matter how hard I tried––” Jinyoung laughs a little and sniffles when Jaebum smiles. “I knew that we’d been bound together somehow. When I was watching you bleed out in front of me again, I knew that if by some miracle you survived, that I would do everything it took to get you to forgive me for leaving. It may not have seemed like it while I was gone, Im Jaebum, but I thought of you, and them, every single day. You never left my heart.” 

There are no words in any language that could describe the feeling that surges through Jaebum’s blood with every strong beat of his heart against his ribs. He thinks of the tattoo on the side of his neck, the one that Jinyoung had almost seen once, and wonders if he would, after all this time, recognize the constellation Virgo and understand that he had never left Jaebum’s heart, either.

“Why, Jinyoung?” he asks in a rasp, voice nearly gone from the tears and tiredness that sinks into his bones; his head turns when there’s a familiar, gleeful shout from down the hall followed by more voices that Jaebum would be able to recognize even in death.

The boys draw closer to his room in the hallway outside, but for now it is only him and Jinyoung suspended here in the precious moment before the storm of the rest of them arrives. He holds Jinyoung’s eyes and his hand against his heart over the first scar of his love and knows that there is so much more to come. There are thirteen years of questions to be asked, and to be answered. There are thirteen years of fights to be had, and thirteen years of making up. Thirteen years of kisses, of pleasure, of love. The road is so, so, long but for once he feels like he is no longer alone in walking it. The person shaped hole in their lives had always held Jinyoung’s silhouette, and now that it was filled, Jaebum thinks that they can heal. All seven of them. They had survived this ordeal like fate had planned for them to do and so now the seven of them can patch up thirteen years worth of wounds and carry on with lives no longer aching with the grief of missing.

“Because,” Jinyoung says with a soft smile, just before the door opens and the boys spill in. “I love you. And I always have.”

The door opens and the flood pours in: five voices overlap in shouts and some tears as they converge on Jaebum like puppies, careful not to jostle him too roughly but making it clear in their words that he’d better not almost die again, or they’re going to just go ahead and do it themselves. Jaebum laughs through the tears for the first time in what feels like a lifetime. He pulls the sheet down so they can look at the bandage over the wound his stomach and inspect it; he meets Jinyoung’s eyes where he looks on with a private smile reserved just for him.

_ I love you, _ he had said. Jaebum smiles back at him. 

_ I love you. _

_ I love you. _

_ I love you.  _

A chorus of their voices, mixed together, in a song that, with some practice, they will learn how to sing again. 

_ And I always have.  _

  
  
  


♡


	17. epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>    
> 
> 
> _Prosus et sursum._

How strange it is, to be reborn. 

 

**   
  


After three long, agonizing weeks, Jaebum was released from the hospital. Those weeks were rife with angst—mostly defenseless, he had laid in bed and allowed them their anger and their tears, often dissolving into tears of his own when the door to his private room slammed shut behind them preceded by an angry exit. But, as they say, time heals all wounds, especially the physical ones. 

They had initially fought Jinyoung on being there when he was released, not wanting to subject either of them to the fanfare it was going to cause, but Jinyoung had already sacrificed so much of his privacy by way of sleeping in the waiting room drenched in blood that wasn’t his and, as he pointed out, it was only fair. He was owed this, in a sense. Jaebum found he had little ground to argue. 

And so he was, as per doctor’s orders, forced to sit down in a wheelchair  _ (“Im Jaebum if you don’t sit down right now I’m going to put you right back in that hospital bed,”  _ Jinyoung had said and Jaebum believed him) and allowed himself to be pushed miserably to the exit.

“This is so embarrassing,” he whined, letting the hair that had grown even longer fall down to cover his face, nearly clear of discolored bruises. 

The cameras flashed and fangirls screamed from behind the barriers of Jinyoung’s security. The brim of Jinyoung’s baseball hat had jabbed him gently in the cheek when he bent down to say in his ear, with a tangible smile, 

“Maybe you should have thought about that before you tried to die, huh?”

Jaebum laughed. It burned, the wound mostly healed but still sore, and he winced shortly after. But he still laughed. 

He  _ laughed.  _

 

**

 

Despite the easiness of his departure from the hospital, it was not painless. Not entirely. They had run the gamut of emotion while he was in the hospital, sure—every single one of them took their turn with him, rebreaking each other’s bones, setting them so they could heal correctly. And despite the way they had laughed toward the end and it seemed he was forgiven, it was not over. Not by a long shot. 

The wound of what he had done to Jinyoung had, like his own, not quite healed all the way, yet. Integrating himself back into Jinyoung’s life as himself and not as Sejin required the rebreaking of some of their own bones, their old ones, and new ones, too; they could not escape the inevitable shouting matches that occurred as Jaebum’s things slowly populated Jinyoung’s space. There was thirteen years of fights to be had. Thirteen years of questions, thirteen years of answers. Thirteen years of  _ I don’t knows  _ and  _ I missed yous  _ suddenly unloaded like heavy bags. 

It was hard. It hurt. It was uncomfortable and it ached like growing pains. Jaebum had betrayed him in the worst of ways, made Jinyoung think he was someone else when all Jinyoung ever wanted was to see him again, and then took the liberty to decide that to die would to be doing him a favor instead of killing Jinyoung inside, instead. And Jinyoung was not blameless, either—he had let Jaebum think he hated him, that his life would continue without him in it, that there was nothing between them left to save. And he had almost let Jaebum die thinking it. In their special way, they had their knives to each other’s hearts and slid the blade in, unlike anyone else ever had or ever could.

His guilt was a knife and Jinyoung wielded it.

It was during one of these explosive showdowns that Jinyoung, crying so hard from anger and fear and hurt that his eyes were almost swollen shut, leapt to his feet next to where Jaebum sat on the couch and demanded to know,

“Why?” he had asked, his voice breaking in the middle. It was not the first time they were going to breach the subject, the  _ why.  _ But more than anything Jinyoung had never been satisfied and he wanted the  _ real  _ why. The  _ something more.  _  “Why did you do that, hyung? Why were you going to let yourself die?”

If he were honest, which he is, he would say that in that moment, watching Jinyoung’s thin chest heave with tears that he had caused hurt worse than dying. Seeing the red splotches on Jinyoung’s cheeks and the way his face crumpled with a fresh wave of pain hurt infinitely worse than the knife that had pierced his gut.

Jaebum, face wet with his own tears, looked up at him and grit his teeth. He said,

“Because I thought we both  _ deserved it.” _

He should have expected the slap. He deserved it and he didn’t. Jinyoung froze at his words for barely a moment before a wretched, painful noise broke loose from his trembling lips; his hand wound back and cracked hard across the open, shining surface of Jaebum’s tear slicked cheek. The wetness only made it worse, stinging, an agonizing reminder that the pain he had caused the one person he loves more than anyone else on earth was also physical. Jaebum had let his head snap to the side and the print of Jinyoung’s hand burn an outline on his face with his eyes closed as Jinyoung stormed from the room and slammed his bedroom door hard enough to rattle the frame. 

But it was just honesty, even if it was brutal. It was all they had left. If they had any hope of surviving the aftermath, and hope they had, they were going to have to do it the hard way.

That night, hours and hours had passed since Jinyoung had slapped him and barricaded himself in his room. Jaebum had done what he always had done, even as Sejin: he went outside and checked the perimeter, jacket pulled tight against the wind, still cold but on the verge of warming. He went back inside and locked the doors and windows before taking a shower by himself in the guest bathroom where he had been before as a different man; it felt surreal, in a way, to look at his reflection in the foggy mirror and not have to cover the moles over his eye before opening the door. Before all of this happened, he could have never pictured ending up like this: himself in Jinyoung’s house and aching for the warmth of his skin. 

He went to bed in the room next to Jinyoung’s. It was quiet, and he could not hear crying, so he thought that Jinyoung might be asleep, but every so often he would hear the slight creak of the bed frame as Jinyoung turned over in the other direction. They were both sleepless. Jaebum wondered if Jinyoung’s sleeplessness was the same sort of his own; the missing. The desire for the warmth. Needing the last puzzle piece of his heart to be fitted into place so he could rest. 

After countless time passed, Jaebum could no longer stand it. He threw the blanket off his legs and got up, hand absently pressing against the puckered mark on his belly where the knife went in like the anxiety of standing outside Jinyoung’s closed door could forcibly pull his organs out. He took a deep breath; it broke. He needed Jinyoung so, so badly. 

He opened the door. Moonlight streamed in through the open curtains and illuminated where Jinyoung was already standing, halfway to the door and his thin chest heaving like he was trying not to cry again. Jaebum’s hand tightened on the doorknob at the sight of him outlined in the milky glow, more beautiful than he’d ever been, and painfully alive. So beautifully, painfully alive, and he had almost let it go.

His voice wavered. “Jinyoung.”

It was all he needed to say: Jinyoung closed the distance between them in two steps, nearly leaping. His arms wrapped around Jaebum’s neck like they had been trained to do so, and he pulled Jaebum backward to bed with their hearts beating in frantic, audible tandem. Jaebum untangled his fingers from Jinyoung’s hair as his knees hit the bed and landed on both hands when Jinyoung pulled him down on top of him. He arched into the line of Jaebum’s body like every inch that wasn’t touching was a place he could be mortally wounded. 

“Hyung,” he breathed, the syllable full of apology, full of want and need and hurry, heavy with the weight that tipped the scales. The warm skin of his stomach stretched against Jaebum’s as his silky shirt rode up under Jaebum’s hand on his back, holding him close. “Hyung.” 

Jinyoung’s mouth found his in the dark. They kissed, quickly, frantically, like by touching this way for the first time as wholly themselves they had started a countdown and time was running out. Their tongues brushed and their hips moved. Their hands were a blur on each other’s bodies, exploring, but with a conspicuous desperation. Jinyoung’s blunt nails dug marks in the bare skin of Jaebum’s back and it felt like the closest he’s ever been to God. Jinyoung’s mouth on his neck, on his chest, pressed against his ear and panting,  _ hyung, I love you. I love you, I’m so sorry, hyung, please, I love you so much.  _ Jinyoung’s mouth on his own, open, gasping in his oxygen, the ultimate sacrifice.

It hurt; it was healing of the hardest kind. 

But it was healing, all the same. 

 

**

 

It’s winter again. 

A breeze blows Jaebum’s coattails out behind him. His face hurts: it’s almost painfully cold, and since Jinyoung had promised the walk would only be five minutes, max,  _ hyung, I swear, _ he didn’t bother to wear a scarf. He should have, anyway. 

He sniffles. “If I get sick, I just want you to know that it’s your fault.”

Jinyoung laughs. His own cheeks are delicately pinked from the freezing wind, and the tip of his nose is, too, even when he scrunches it in a full-blown smile. The lines at the corners of his eyes make Jaebum’s heart stutter. 

“You somehow survived getting stabbed, but then you act like you’ll never survive a cold.”

They stop at the crosswalk at the end of Jinyoung’s road, waiting for the signal before they can cross over to the convenience store standing on the corner and boasting about their hot ramyeon with large, colorful signs in the window front. Jinyoung’s fingers tighten around his for a moment in a playful squeeze; he returns the gesture and sees Jinyoung smiling from the corner of his eye. 

“That’s because a cold is infinitely worse, Jinyoungie,” he says, tucking his face into the upturned collar of his long coat. Jinyoung looks up at him and blinks, still smiling. They’re quiet for a moment as Jinyoung reaches up with a free hand to push the strands of Jaebum’s newly chin-length hair behind his ear and out of his face. 

“Is that so, hyung?” he asks, softly, and it’s clear by his tone that he is no longer thinking about colds or getting stabbed. His bottom lip disappears into his mouth for a moment—Jaebum recognizes this as his unconscious desire for a kiss. 

And he obliges. Jaebum leans over and presses their lips together; cold noses to each other’s faces and smiling at the sensation of it. When he pulls away, Jinyoung’s cheeks are noticeably redder. 

The signal changes and they cross the street hand in hand. It would be ignorant of them to assume they aren’t being watched: he knows they are, because he saw the paparazzo as soon as the iron gates of Jinyoung’s house shut behind them and Jackson waved them off from the glass booth. He hasn’t been very inconspicuous, shamelessly capturing photos of famous actor Park Jinyoung exchanging equally shameless kisses with his bodyguard boyfriend. 

_ Boyfriend.  _ When he thinks of it, even still, months and months after the fact, it still feels foreign. Barely a year ago he was laying down his life for Jinyoung, and now he’s kissing him on a public street corner and appearing on the cover of tabloid magazines with made up headlines. There had been rumors even when he was Sejin, as he was so painfully made aware of that morning after they had sex in the hotel room, but even in that moment he could have never pictured a reality in which the rumors were true. 

They are, though. Jaebum is officially, exclusively, proudly, Park Jinyoung’s boyfriend.  _ And  _ his bodyguard. 

What a life.

“Hey,” Jinyoung says, poking him in the hip. “Aren’t you going to open the door for me?”

But he’s already pulling the glass door of the convenience store open and laughing at Jaebum’s eyeroll. He holds it open and fists a hand in the back of Jaebum’s coat as he passes and doesn’t let it go, even when the door closes and the bell overhead stops jingling. 

The convenience store is warm, and crowded with color. Racks and racks of wrappers in every color on the spectrum, organized by size and so perfectly set it almost looks fake. The store itself is not very wide; the racks are pressed claustrophobically close to one another and the two of them have to walk down them in single file with their arms pressed tightly to their sides to avoid knocking everything down. It’s cramped and it’s a little humid from the stations to boil water and the jarring noise of the heater running somewhere in a hidden back room, but it has become their holy place, a (mostly) hidden oasis. 

Along the back wall and adjacent to the large glass window that makes up the storefront is an equally cluttered counter covered with microwaves and mini-fridges with cold bottles of filtered water. Packs of ramyeon arranged from red to purple to black sit in a tiny stand wedged between stacks of microwaves from different eras. 

Jaebum stands behind him, one hand on Jinyoung’s waist and the other in his coat pocket while Jinyoung taps his chin. He turns slightly to look at him. 

“What kind do you want, hyung? Something spicy?”

“Mm, not today. Do they have the kimchi kind?”

Jinyoung pokes a yellow packet and it crinkles loudly under the touch. “Yep, it’s this one. Is this what you want?”

Jaebum nods. With a soft smile, Jinyoung picks up two bags, one for each of them, and disappears to the front to pay after grabbing two of the mini water bottles. He leans against the counter with his back and waves to the paparazzo standing outside the window and slightly behind a parked car; the man looks visibly embarrassed and tries to disappear behind a taller car right next to it.

He snorts. Price of fame-by-proxy, he guesses. 

From where he’s standing, he can just barely see the back of Jinyoung’s head and the blushing face of the young, pretty clerk who fumbles awkwardly with their purchases. He isn’t close enough to hear, but he can tell even from this far that she’s new, and completely blindsided by the appearance of someone so famous in the tiny store. The other workers are used to them by now; the novelty of heartthrob Park Jinyoung and his intimidating shadow of a bodyguard-slash-boyfriend no longer flusters them like it used to. It’s sweet, actually, that she seems so shy: Jaebum smiles as Jinyoung holds her hand and talks to her softly. One thing that has never changed about him even in their years apart is the gentleness he can exhibit to the people who really deserve it.

In truth, he never gets tired of looking at Jinyoung. After nearly permanently letting him go for good, it’s hard to look away, drinking up every inch of him with his eyes at every possible moment. Jinyoung meets his eyes over one of the racks of candies and snacks and raises a curious eyebrow over a smirk. 

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks, but Jaebum is sure he knows. He’s told him a million times, anyway.  _ I just can’t stop looking at you.  _ He has thirteen years of looking to make up for, after all. Jinyoung seems to catch onto this train of thought and the smirk softens into a shy smile that crinkles his eyes handsomely at the corners. 

“You know why,” Jaebum murmurs. He takes the packets of ramyeon from Jinyoung and turns to the counter to grab the paper bowls and empties the contents into them. Jinyoung sighs happily and steps up to his side, leaning heavily into him. The scratchy material of his navy wool coat scritches audibly again Jaebum’s.

“Tell me again.”

Jaebum laughs a little. He pours the bottled water into both bowls, first, then puts them in the microwave to cook for a few moments before turning to look into Jinyoung’s face. 

Often, in the quieter times, when he looks at Jinyoung’s face, he sees so much of their past and wonders how he could ever shouldered the pain the way he had. He remembers that last night in the house, how every glance at Jinyoung’s face was just one glance closer to the last. He remembers the way his heart felt, then. More vaguely, he remembers the way Jinyoung screamed for him as he bled out on the floor. Jinyoung’s face in the elevator when he thought Sejin would kiss him, and how badly he wanted to in that moment. Jaebum feels as though he has lived more lifetimes than he deserves, and somehow Jinyoung has been in all of them, which he may deserve even less. 

Jinyoung’s warm, soft palm on his cheek breaks him from the spiraling of his thoughts. When he focuses again, Jinyoung’s handsome face has softened, eyebrows furrowed a little, but a smile tucked into one corner of his mouth. 

“What are you thinking about?”

“You,” he says, because it’s always the answer. Every time.

“What about me?”

The microwaves ding in unison before he can answer. He turns, kissing Jinyoung’s palm before letting it drop away from his face so he can finish mixing the powdered flavor into both of their bowls. He slides one to Jinyoung, wooden chopsticks clicking together as furious steam rises from the noodles bubbling in the soup. Daringly, Jaebum hardly waits before slurping some loudly into his mouth and gasping around the blazing temperature of them. 

“You gotta wait longer, idiot,” Jinyoung says, elbow in Jaebum’s ribs. 

“I was thinking,” Jaebum replies, ignoring the jab and going to answer Jinyoung’s question as noodles hang off his chopsticks to steam in the air before he shoves them in his mouth. “About, you know. Everything. I was thinking about how much time I wasted being angry when we could have had this.”

Jinyoung hums and takes his first bite, nodding. When he swallows, he licks his lips and says, “mm. I think it had to happen this way for it to work, hyung.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’ll always be just a little bit angry that you thought you could die to make things better, but I think it had to happen that way for us.” his eyes are so brown, so deep, so reflective and sincere as he looks up at Jaebum and blinks. “I think, even though it was hard, hyung, it had to happen like this. Our lives were never easy, never cut and dry.”

“Destiny?” Jaebum mumbles around a mouthful of noodles. Jinyoung smirks privately, the one reserved just for him.

His heart does cartwheels.

“Yes. You are my destiny, hyung.”

“Ah,” he says. He bumps Jinyoung’s bicep with his elbow, rim of the paper bowl nearly to his lips as he loudly slurps his ramyeon. “Cheesy.” 

Indignantly, Jinyoung scoffs, but his cheeks are flushed with a slightly embarrassed pink and he smiles. “Ha!  _ Me  _ cheesy? Very funny coming from you, Mr. I-Will-Die-For-You,”

It’s a joke, of course. Jaebum knows it’s a joke. It’s one they tell quite often, no longer so bogged down by the weight of their mistakes, but unchained in the freedom in which they can make jokes about them in the right situations.

“I would,” he says back, being serious. “You know that, don’t you?” 

Jinyoung furrows his brows again and talks around the noodles hanging from his plump lips. “Do what?”

“Die for you.”

He swallows, eyes wide in surprise. “Hyung—“

“I would die for you, Park Jinyoung.” Jaebum sets his mostly empty bowl on the counter and leans on both hands. “I almost did once, and then again, and I would do it over and over. If I could changed what happened, I would, but even still it doesn’t change the fact that I would die for you.” 

The silence is heavy. In the background, the white noise of a convenience store drones like a television turned down low and humming from another room. He looks at Jinyoung, who is looking back at him, ramyeon bowl no longer held up to his mouth but set neatly on the counter next to his; his eyes are serious and soft when they meet his own.  

This is the fundamental truth of them: they would die for each other. No questions asked. The stars had aligned for them long before their births. Unequivocally bound together, their fortunes penned by those heavenly bodies. They are the moon and the tide, the inhale and the exhale of the universe in which they are at the center of. 

But Jinyoung knows this; he can read it in the depths of Jaebum’s eyes. He smiles.

“So serious, hyung,” he says, and puts a palm on Jaebum’s ribs to shove him lightly. The wound in his stomach no longer hurts, and neither does the one in his heart. He winces theatrically anyway just to get Jinyoung to laugh more. “Lighten up, will you?”

Jaebum laughs with him, just as the  _ tap tap tap  _ of a steady rain begins to pound against the glass of the shop window. They turn in unison and Jinyoung makes an audible noise of distress when the  _ tap tap tap  _ turns into the steady drumming of a sudden winter storm. 

“What the hell is this?” he whines, fisting his hand in the back of Jaebum’s coat again, as has become his secret habit. Jaebum is reminded of the first time he had done something similar, when he was Sejin, at a crowded airport. “Seriously? It wasn’t supposed to rain until later this week!”

“Yah, lighten up, will you?” Jaebum jokes, already pulling his cellphone from his coat pocket. He scrolls for Yugyeom’s number and hesitates before dialing. “We could just call Yugyeom to pick us up, moneybags.” 

Jinyoung snorts a short  _ HA!  _ in a sarcastic laugh. He seems to consider it for a moment, though, and Jaebum watches the options chase themselves across his features the way the neon lights in the window kaleidoscope colors on his skin. He pulls his bottom lip in between his teeth in thought for a moment before seeming to make a hard decision and sighing heavily.

“No, that’s a waste. You know he’d just complain anyway.” Jinyoung pinches his face in the way he does any time he mocks Yugyeom and says, whining,  _ “yah, hyung, why do I have to do that? Why can’t Jaebum hyung do that? Can Youngjae hyung do that instead? Hyung, I’m tired. Hyung, hyung, hyung— _ oof!”

He stops and dissolves into giggling when Jaebum playfully slaps him in the stomach to get him to stop mocking their youngest, even though Jaebum is laughing, too. Jinyoung isn’t  _ wrong,  _ per se. Yugyeom does like to complain, but he always comes through when he needs to.

Jaebum slides his phone back into his pocket and turns his head. “So what, then? Neither of us have an umbrella. If we don’t call Yugyeom, we either stay in here until it stops or we make a run for it.”

Jinyoung’s smile is wide and mischievous. Without missing a beat he grabs Jaebum’s hand and pulls him along behind him, almost knocking Jaebum off his feet. 

“I guess we better run fast then, huh?” 

When Jinyoung shoves the door open, the bell overhead jingles, and Jaebum barely has time to look back and see the shy clerk leaning on her hands over the counter to gape at them in wide eyed surprise. He laughs, freely, and as Jinyoung pulls him along and they run side by side and hand in hand in the downpour, it reminds him of so many days when they were younger, reckless children from broken homes who had nothing but this sort of happiness, the freedom of running until their lungs hurt and their legs were tired. Cold, harsh rain pummels his shoulders and soaks his hair; Jinyoung’s eyes are squinted against the water that runs into his face from the strands of his own hair plastered to his forehead. Jaebum grips their slippery hands tighter together and pulls, urging him to run faster, to laugh louder when Jaebum almost slips, to push his heart to that level of frantic, incomprehensible beating. Jaebum closes his eyes for a single moment, picturing no ground underneath them, just the two of them and the rain. A glorious freefall. 

“Hyung!” Jinyoung shouts, knocking their wet elbows together as they slide to a stop at the iron gate at the end of Jinyoung’s driveway. Jaebum lays a hand on the buzzer and keeps pushing until Jackson’s face appears on the small screen with wide eyes. 

His voice crackles through the speaker, almost inaudible over the sound of the rain beating the pavement. “What the hell are you two doing?!”

“Open the gate!” Jaebum shouts. There’s a smile splitting his face and he wonders what that looks like. He spent thirteen years forgetting how to smile; now that he’s still alive and the seven of them are all back together, he wonders if it suits him. 

The gate, as requested, creaks open with a mighty shriek like thunder. Jinyoung shoves it open just enough to squeeze through, and he pulls Jaebum in after him and shakes with laughter.

“It’s so cold!” Jackson says, and they both turn at the sound of his voice. He’s got the glass door of the booth open, urging them both to step just inside where they can get out of the rain but not drip freezing water all over the security equipment. He sits back down in his chair and stares at them. “Are you guys crazy? You should have just called Yugyeom!”

Inside the booth just over the threshold, Jinyoung and Jaebum huddle together like little birds. Jinyoung shakes against him; Jaebum pulls him closer and motions for him to make it quick. 

“I could have, but it was more fun this way. Right hyung?”

His teeth chatter together in answer, but for sake of making him smile, he nods his head. 

“Anyway,” Jinyoung says, his own teeth starting to click together, and he flicks water at Jackson’s slack-jawed face and cackles when he flails in indignance. “We’re going to go inside to take a shower now, but dinner is still at six, okay?” 

After wiping the water from his cheeks, Jackson fakes a theatrical gag and turns back around in his roller chair to face the computers again. “Gross. Spare me the details. I’ll see you at six.”

With an impatient wave of his hand, Jackson ushers them from the booth and they sprint the short distance across the yard to the front door, where they collapse against each other for warmth as they pull it open and fall inside. 

“Oh, it’s so warm in here,” Jinyoung breathes, struggling to yank off his heavy wool coat. Jaebum laughs and helps him shove it off of his shoulders, where it then plops loudly on the hardwood floor. “Why does Jackson always think that anything we do alone together means it’s sexual?”

Jaebum shrugs. He fights his way out of his own coat and rolls his shoulders, trying to unstick his white dress shirt from his chest and stomach with little luck. “Because he’s a pervert.”

Jinyoung barks a  _ HA!  _ with much more amusement than he had earlier in the day. When his turtleneck gets stuck around his chin, he whines and thrashes until Jaebum helps him pull it the rest of the way off. 

His cheeks are flushed, rosy pink like his lips, parted on a gasp when he can finally breathe. It is an innocent gesture. A natural, involuntary response to the oppressive nature in which he couldn’t breathe through the heaviness of his wet sweater, and yet Jaebum feels the sensualness of it like a punch in the stomach.

And to Jinyoung’s credit, he notices. His eyes crinkle at the corners and his free hand creeps its way from its place at his side to the humid, damp warmth of Jaebum’s hip. 

“Looks like he’s not the only pervert,” Jinyoung murmurs.

Jaebum makes a face. “Very funny.” 

In any case, Jinyoung stops gazing at Jaebum’s chest in his now see-through shirt long enough to be turned around by the shoulders and marched through the house and into his bathroom. He (smugly) thinks that by the way Jinyoung can’t seem to stop checking him out while he steps into the glass stall of the shower to turn the water on, he could also remind Jinyoung that  _ he’s  _ a pervert, but the attention to his body feels good and he bites his lips.

“Hyung,” Jinyoung says, softly, once Jaebum ducks out of the way of the overhead spray and steps back onto the cold tile. He looks at where Jinyoung is leaning against the counter and watching him.

“What?” 

“Do you remember that day in the motel?” he asks, arms crossed, although likely more so to shield Jaebum’s wandering eyes than from the cold, as the hot shower starts to fill the room with humid steam. “The next morning, I mean.” 

It would be hard not to. Images flash across the backs of his eyelids when he closes his eyes for a moment. Jinyoung, on the bed, staring at his body like he couldn’t believe he was real. Jinyoung’s hand on him in the bed, Jinyoung underneath him, illuminated by the watery moonlight, sweating lightly and moaning. Jinyoung in the bathroom with his arms around Jaebum’s neck, thinking he was someone else, gearing up for a kiss. His body lithe on the bed, calling to him. 

A lighthouse, calling him home. 

Jaebum’s stomach churns, both with an anxious guilt as he remembers that time of their lives, and a desire that sparks and starts to burn at even the thought of Jinyoung’s body underneath him. 

“Of course. Yeah. What about it?” 

“Would you have told me then?” Jinyoung asks. His body shakes ever so slightly with cold shivers even as the humid steam of the water starts to oppress the air in the bathroom. The long sleeve shirt he had on underneath his turtleneck is plastered disastrously well to the lean muscle of his stomach; his navel is perfectly outlined by the damp fabric and becomes a point of distraction that Jaebum desperately tries to get away from. 

He blinks. “About who I was?”

“Yeah. If you knew, then, that this is how it would have turned out.”

Would he? He’s not sure. It’s hard to say—at the time, he so concretely thought that the lives they were living then were the only paths they could ever take. Despite the way his resolve had started to crumble, then, he’s not sure that, at that time, he would have let himself believe that there could be a time in the future where he stood across from a soaking wet Jinyoung in a bathroom with desire starting to boil in his gut just from the sight of him. He’s not sure it would have changed their course, anyway. 

“I don’t know,” he says, honestly. He sighs a little and starts to unbutton his shirt at the throat, eyes on Jinyoung’s face, whose eyes are on Jaebum’s hands. “It’s hard to say. I don’t know that it would have changed anything at the time, because of the way I felt. Do you understand what I mean?”

But Jinyoung just hums. It could be an agreement or a noise of thoughtfulness, but he seems content to no longer pursue the subject as he leans against the counter and watches as Jaebum slowly unbuttons his dress shirt and lets it fall open. Out of pure habit, Jaebum’s hand comes up and covers the wretched, puckered scar just under his ribs like he’s trying to hide it. 

“Come here,” Jinyoung murmurs, just loudly enough to be heard over the water hitting the tile floor of the shower behind the glass. And, just like he had the morning in the hotel room, Jaebum lets his feet carry him to close the distance, compelled forward by the gravity that exists around Jinyoung’s being. 

He steps forward in between Jinyoung’s splayed feet. He tries not to let his breath catch when Jinyoung grabs his wrist and pulls it away, but it does anyway when Jinyoung’s other hand comes up and traces the scar with gentle fingertips. It’s not the first time he’s touched it, and it’s not even the first time that he’s touched it in a way that was distinctly sensual or with intent, but Jaebum’s heart starts to thunder like it is, anyway.

Jinyoung traces the scar with his fingertips, face turned down to watch as he does, and he straightens up a little when Jaebum gets more into his space to lean on the counter with both hands on either side of Jinyoung’s waist. He can feel the damp heat radiating off of him in the places that they’re touching; knees, thighs, arms. The coals in his stomach stoke and burn a little hotter at the closeness. 

This close, he can see the pink flush that spreads down Jinyoung’s neck to the tops of his chest where the rain has slightly stretched the collar of his t-shirt. Still looking at his hand on Jaebum’s stomach, he flattens it to a palm and runs it up slowly to rest it in the center of his chest, leaving a trail of electricity in its wake. 

Jinyoung looks up at him, finally, and his dark eyes are swallowed up even more by the black of his pupils, wide and wanting. In a hushed breath, Jinyoung keeps sliding his hand up Jaebum’s bare chest to the back of his neck and breathes, 

“What about that day in the elevator? Do you remember that?” 

He’ll never forget. Not as long as he lives. The sound of Jinyoung’s breath leaving his chest as his back hit the elevator wall, too small to hold them both at a reasonable distance. The way the light, a sort of sickly amber unique to elevators, reflected in his eyes and shone down the length of his throat as his head tipped back. The slight parting of his lips, asking without asking for a kiss, the way he’s kind of doing now—

“Of course I remember,” he says, sort of breathless. Jinyoung’s fingers find the hair at the back of his neck and tangle in it; the pulling makes him groan softly despite trying to bite the noise back. “Jinyoung—“ 

And in a startling mirror of that day that began his plummet toward the earth, Jinyoung tips his head back, lips parted, face flushed from the humid heat of the room and from his own desire that vibrates in every place that they touch. His fingers tighten in Jaebum’s hair and the ones on his free hand dip into the waistband of Jaebum’s dress pants underneath his navel, tugging him even closer by the belt. 

“You never told me the truth, hyung,” he whispers, and it is dangerously sexy. His breath ghosts across the open, impatient seam of Jaebum’s lips; the fire in his belly has caught and started to rage as Jinyoung roughly sticks his fingers lower into the front of his pants to grab tightly at the material, completely in control of him. “You wanted to kiss me, right?”

“Yes,” he groans, stomach tightening at the brush of Jinyoung’s fingertips closer to the base of his hardening cock. He licks his lips impatiently. “Yes, Jinyoung-ah, I wanted to kiss you so badly that day—“ 

Jinyoung’s breath catches in his throat at the heat of Jaebum’s words, cutting him off. “Oh, hyung, I know. Kiss me now, then.”

So he does.

Already wet from the water and the rain, their mouths slide together easily as Jaebum closes the distance. His eyelashes flutter on the tops of his cheeks as Jinyoung’s tongue, hot and insistent, slides along his and curls against the back of his teeth. Fingers tighten in hair and in clothes as their kiss goes from a slow, deep rhythm to a frantic one of teeth and tongues and whimpered moans. Jaebum’s dress shirt is pushed carefully off of his shoulders and to the floor, where it’s promptly forgotten about as the two of them wrestle with the soaked, sticky fabric of Jinyoung’s t-shirt. Quiet laughter dissolves back into breathless noises as his shirt is also discarded and Jaebum’s mouth trails hot kisses to his neck. 

“Hyung,” Jinyoung whines, back bowing, abandoning the rest of what he’d been about to say in a loud moan when Jaebum sinks his teeth into the sensitive skin of his neck just underneath his ear. Blunt fingernails digging into his neck send sparks of pleasure-pain skittering down the length of Jaebum’s spine as he tongues over the mark and sucks a temporary one over the top of it. 

Jaebum moves his kisses up the way he knows Jinyoung likes, teeth on his earlobe and breath hot in his ear, murmuring something filthy that makes Jinyoung’s knees lose their strength. Now mostly hard, Jinyoung grinds lazily against the firmness of Jaebum’s thigh while he sucks another bruising mark into his neck. Sweat from the humidity of the bathroom starts to ever-so-slightly curl the shorter pieces of hair by Jaebum’s ears. 

Finally he leans back, lips swollen and feeling kind of sore, to look into Jinyoung’s face with a matching expression of subtle desperation. 

“I think we should get in the shower now, Jinyoung-ah.” 

But Jinyoung shakes his head; he whimpers and grinds his hips harder against Jaebum’s thigh, redirecting his attention. Jaebum looks down between them to see the visible outline of Jinyoung’s hard cock in his soaked dress pants against him, and his own throbs at the sight of it. 

“Take me to bed, hyung,” he whispers, hips slowly moving, ever so slightly pushing his own thigh between Jaebum’s legs higher up into his groin. The pressure of it against his sensitive cock makes him groan from deep in his chest and grab Jinyoung’s waist tighter.

“Aren’t you cold, though?” he asks, breathless, trying to sound concerned, but the way Jinyoung is watching him from underneath his eyelashes as he half-rides his thigh in the bathroom makes it really hard to stay that way. Jinyoung’s pink-flushed face gets even more red as his cock throbs against Jaebum’s leg and he hiccups on a moan in the way he does when he wants to come. 

“Y—yes,” he stutters, slowing down, moving his arms so they wrap around Jaebum’s neck. He angles his head so their lips brush when he says, “but you’ll keep me warm, hyung. Won’t you?” 

There will never be any answer to this except  _ yes. Yes, yes, yes.  _

Jinyoung lets him go for a fraction of a second to turn off the water in the shower before clinging to him again. Their mutual regard for the wetness of their pants dissolves under the mounting heat of their kisses as Jinyoung pulls the bathroom door open from behind his back and leads Jaebum to bed. Jinyoung lays on his back with an arm thrown over his eyes as Jaebum quickly undoes his belt, fingers shaking, both from the slightly cold air of the bedroom and anticipation. Jinyoung makes the most delicate, delicious noise when his pants are unzipped and Jaebum sticks his fingers in the waistband of both his dress pants and his underwear to slowly peel them off. 

It’s almost unfair how beautiful he is: once his damp clothes are thrown to the floor somewhere behind him, he studies the lithe length of Jinyoung’s naked body where he lays sideways on the bed. Pinkness spreads down his chest in a deep blush as Jaebum just keeps looking; hands on Jinyoung’s bent knees that fall together in shyness the longer he looks, obscuring the hard, flushed length of his cock between his slender thighs. 

He removes his arm from his eyes, both hands fisted in the sheets. His chest heaves with want as Jaebum makes eye contact with him and roughly shoves his knees apart.

All it takes is one word. One whispered, whimpered word, tumbling from the swell of Jinyoung’s soft lips.

_ “Please.”  _

Without hesitation, Jaebum unbuckles his belt between Jinyoung’s spread legs and rids himself of the rest of his clothes. 

Jinyoung whimpers. Before he kneels on the bed over him, Jaebum rustles around in the side table drawer for a small bottle of lube he’d stashed there, for the inevitable moment where they rocketed into unexpected intimacy. Which, when he thinks about it as he ushers Jinyoung to move up on the bed a little to make room for him to kneel, he wonders if it’s really  _ unexpected  _ if it happens all the time. Regardless, Jackson’s sexual sixth sense seemed to be right since they ended up in bed together, anyway.

“Hyungie,” Jinyoung breathes, sliding his warm hands up Jaebum’s forearms as he leans weight on one and drizzles lube onto Jinyoung’s lower belly with his free hand. He flinches at the cold of it, stomach contracting, but it slowly dissolves into a moan when it warms under Jaebum’s fingers. He twitches as the thick liquid runs over his hips onto the bed; the joke he’d surely been about to make about changing the sheets quickly diverts into a low, rough moan when Jaebum drags the lube down between his thighs with two fingers. 

Where as first the moment started out frantic, time has slowed to allow them this. Jaebum savors the noise that Jinyoung makes when he slides the first finger in, and eats up the second with his mouth when Jinyoung whines for him to enter another. His arm starts to tremble from the effort of holding himself up while he fingers Jinyoung open, slow and deep, tongues lazy and rough as they lick each other’s mouths. But the noises Jinyoung makes for him are too good to stop: it’s everything he wanted that night in the motel, hearing Jinyoung moan his name, his  _ true  _ name, and the novelty has not worn off even after being together for the better part of a year.  _ Jaebum hyung, Jaebum hyung, oh, hyung, Jaebum hyung, just like that.  _

He drops to his elbow, unable to hold himself up much longer as he gently slides in a third finger and breathes in the noise Jinyoung makes. Jinyoung lifts his arms and slides them around his neck, locking, holding on for dear life it seems as Jaebum just laughs breathlessly into his neck while he twists his wrist just to make Jinyoung jerk. His thighs fall apart and come back together to squeeze Jaebum’s hips, clenching around his fingers and leaking precome onto his lube-slick belly.

“Hyung,” he gasps, the fingers of one hand fisting in the hair at the back of his head and yanking roughly as his back bows off the bed. He twitches and clenches harder, cock hard and heavy and untouched between them. “Hyung, please––” another gasp breaks his sentence in two, “I want you––fuck––inside me,  _ please.” _

With little fanfare or theatrics, Jaebum laughs into his neck again and gently slides his fingers out of Jinyoung. There’s a moment of readjusting; noses brushing and sloppy kisses exchanged as Jaebum slides him a little further up the bed before positioning himself over him. His own cock, largely ignored except for where he’d been grinding slightly into the mattress while fingering Jinyoung open, twitches when he runs wet fingertips along the underside of it. He bites both lips hard enough to hurt and lets them go with a groan when Jinyoung drops his thighs further apart, the insides slick and glistening like an offering. 

This is not new to them. The first time, in Jinyoung’s moon soaked bedroom after the fight, had felt more raw and real than even their time in the motel room. It was frantic, desperate, rough. Everything a real first time should and shouldn’t be; but despite the intimate doors it opened for them, there was never a time in the last near year of their official relationship where it did not feel like the first time for Jaebum. Every time Jinyoung laid under him or settled on top of him, it was the first time, and his heart beat thunderously in kind. 

Even so, as Jaebum listens to Jinyoung’s breathless, whispered encouragements as he slicks up his own cock with a quick hand, his skin started to prickle. He adjusts Jinyoung’s hips to line up, teasing at first, pushing in to the head but pulling back out, grinning at Jinyoung’s pout. The fire that had started in his stomach, low at first like warm coals, surges into the blaze of an untamed wildfire as he braces on both hands and pushes inside of Jinyoung, slow, but to the hilt. 

_ “Fuck,”  _ Jinyoung breathes, lips trembling, and the two of them squeeze their eyes shut and chuckle in between quiet gasps for air. For him, too, it always seems like the first time; he never tires of the way Jinyoung’s mouth drops open on a gasp, some curse word spilling from it, followed by a shy laugh. And Jinyoung, he never seems to tire of the way that Jaebum lets him adjust for a moment, kissing his mouth or his neck, until Jinyoung starts to squirm in a silent plea of  _ Jaebum hyung, make love to me now. Please.  _

The clock on the other bedside table behind Jinyoung’s head reads 5:05. Dinner, their daily promise to be together as seven, would normally make Jaebum hurry, but he disregards the time and starts with a slow rhythm. The only sound in the room is the soft creaking of the bed frame underneath the symphony of their breaths. Every thrust, deep, Jaebum’s thighs tense, elbows locked, watching the pleasure color Jinyoung’s cheeks pink as their eyes meet and hold. Jinyoung holds Jaebum by the neck with both hands as his pace starts to pick up: he shortens the stroke but deepens the thrust, leaning on one hand to pull Jinyoung more into his lap with the other to better the angle.

_ “Fuck!”  _ he shouts, arching, letting go of Jaebum’s neck to fist one hand in the sheets and the other in his hair at the back of his head. Sweat plasters Jinyoung’s own dark hair to his temples and forehead; he looks every bit the fucked out, beautiful creature he’d been made out to be when Jaebum first took the hit, only now it belongs to him, and only him. Jaebum admires the hard line of his throat and his jaw as Jinyoung tips his head back and begs him to go  _ just a little faster, hyung, a little faster. _

“Like that?” Jaebum pants, dropping back down to both hands, watching the sweat drip off his chin and trace down Jinyoung’s exposed throat as he braces his knees on the bed and starts to thrust a little faster. Jinyoung’s noises come closer together––no longer drawn out groans and gasps but short, stuttered moans that make Jaebum’s balls draw up at the sound of them. Jaebum tosses his hair back out of his face and groans, “God, Jinyoung, you sound so good––”

He snorts a laugh, breathlessly, and pitches into a high moan when Jaebum moves his hands to his waist to hold him down. Jinyoung tips his head back down to watch as he grips Jaebum’s wrists and rocks his hips to meet the deep, quick thrusts. Lips swollen and shining, Jinyoung licks them once before sinking his teeth into the bottom one and squeezing his eyes shut against the pleasure. 

“Just––just a lil’ more, Jaebumhyung,” he moans, breath coming so fast he combines it into one word. “Lil’more, god, yes, Jaebumhyung, Jaebumhyung––”

“C’mon, baby,” Jaebum pants, blinking the sweat out of his eyes. “Let go, c’mon, come for me––”

The noise Jinyoung makes is a paradox of heaven and hell; so good it makes Jaebum’s heartstrings hum but so sinful that the fire engulfing his body burns so hot he feels like he might go blind. Jinyoung bucks his hips, writhing, thighs sliding against Jaebum’s sweat-damp hips to lock around his waist with his ankles crossed in the small of Jaebum’s back. At this angle he can arch up and rut his cock against Jaebum’s flat stomach, little noises ratcheting up higher and higher in pitch as Jaebum fucks him down into the bed. 

“God dammit, hyung,” Jinyoung growls, gasping, eyes squeezed shut and then opened wide as he tilts his head back. His adam’s apple bobs wildly with every desperate, fucked-out noise that leaves his lips until he’s digging his blunt nails violently into the expanse of Jaebum’s shoulders and moaning his name at the top his lungs, cock throbbing between their bellies and painting them both with come. 

Breathing hard, Jinyoung relaxes back into the mattress and coaxes Jaebum to coming with soft words and a hand between them, urging him to pull out so Jinyoung can finish him off. His knees start to shake and he bites his lip so hard it hurts when Jinyoung jerks him off rough and dirty. 

“Feel good, hyung?” he whispers, leaning up to brush his wet, swollen lips against the shell of Jaebum’s ear before sticking his tongue into it. Jaebum yelps and thrusts his hips into Jinyoung’s hand, pulse surging; Jinyoung continues to suckle on his earlobe and stroke his cock until Jaebum’s whole body is tensing. Jinyoung, grinning now against his ear, whispers filth into his ear accompanied by the warmth of his deadly tongue until Jaebum groans and comes messily with a stuttering moan over Jinyoung’s fingers and their stomachs. 

Arms still shaking, Jaebum waits until Jinyoung wipes his fingers off on his stomach before collapsing on top of him. Jinyoung  _ oofs  _ quietly at the sudden weight before dissolving into giggles, wrapping his arms around Jaebum’s neck and burying his face in his hair. 

“I love you, hyung,” Jinyoung says, breathing slowed and normal. Jaebum lifts his head and props himself up on his elbows to peer down into Jinyoung’s flushed, handsome face. Their smiles grow at the same time and Jaebum kisses him once, softly, before pulling away to keep looking at him.

And, oh, if Jaebum could only explain the depth of his love. They had been separated by time, and space, and very nearly by death, that destroyer of worlds. And yet they had beat it every time; despite the odds stacked against them by those same heavenly bodies who wrote their fate into the stars like those tattooed on Jaebum’s neck in the shape of Jinyoung’s constellation, they crossed the distance and met in the middle. They are unstoppable, a force beyond what the earth, the stars, the  _ universe _ could ever know. 

Jaebum smiles. “I love you, too, Jinyoung-ah.”

It’s so easy, now. So, so easy. 

As Jaebum ushers Jinyoung into the shower a few minutes later to clean up and get warm, he thinks about something he read in a book, once, during the time that Jinyoung was gone. He closes his eyes against the heat of the water and leans into Jinyoung’s touch, long hair tousled by Jinyoung’s fingers as he washes it for him, and tries to remember what the passage had said. Something about how, when you hit the very bottom, there’s nowhere else to go but up. Something like that. He wonders, even as Jinyoung traces the scars on his chest and stomach with gentle fingers and then kisses him deep, if it would have helped him, then, when he was Sejin, and so unsure that anything could get any worse. When he finally became sure that there was no life without Jinyoung in it, and so there would be no life left for him to live.

It comes back to him when they’re dressing. Jaebum is pulling on a pair of casual slacks shoulder to shoulder with Jinyoung, who is pulling on some wide-leg trousers he insists are fashionable. Something so domestic, so natural, so ingrained into their routine now that Jaebum feels like, once again, his life has split into the before-and-after of events; the before Jinyoung, and the after. Jinyoung leans into his shoulder as Jaebum debates on what to pull on, humming softly under his breath, utterly content. Jaebum thinks that, yes, if he had known what the passage was, then, that it might have helped. To know that he had hit the utter bottom of the well of his heart and the only thing left to do was fill it back up, this time with Jinyoung’s love, and the shared love of all seven of them, whole again, it would have helped. But Jinyoung was right––it had to happen this way, for them to end up here. And now there’s nowhere else to go but up.

Jaebum, not for the last time, smiles and kisses Jinyoung’s forehead.

_ Prorsus et sursum.  _

_ Onward and upward. _

 


End file.
